Culture: One of the important parts of creating a viable community is its self-definition. Our discussion on this point begins with an important sociological boundary that is not explicitly mentioned but which is crucial for understanding the Nephite self-definition. At this historical point, the Nephites’ natural boundary is geographical—their village and its lands—all inhabited by people who look to Nephi as their leader. They constitute a single religious, social, political, and economic community. This fact, while logical, is a significant departure from the sociological development of Christianity in the New Testament where the new religion had to establish itself inside the physical and conceptual boundaries of multiple towns, each containing multiple factions. The New Testament Christians formed a religious community, but continued to participate in their former political, economic, and, to some extent, social communities. The Nephite group is uniform at this point, since its religious, political, and conceptual boundaries were all coterminous.
The language used to describe the boundaries separating inside from outside can tell us much about how the community sees itself and how it defines the others with which it must deal. Being a Nephite meant living in a distinct place, being ruled by a single individual, and sharing the same religion. It is reasonable that the Nephites would have continued the Old World tradition of a culture oriented to the group rather than the individual. As social scientists Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh explain:
In contemporary American society the question “Who are you?” is a question about what uniquely characterizes an individual. It is a question that only the individual can really answer. In collectivist societies, however, identity normally derives from and traces back to the group in which one is embedded. One is “of Nazareth,” or “of Cyrene,” identifying the place/community in which identity resides. At a more specific level, one is “son of Joseph,” or “son of Abraham.” Thus, identity is family identity.
The Nephites would thus have seen “insiders” (themselves and their community members) in collective terms but also would have seen outsiders in the same way. Thus Jacob notes, “the people which were not Lamanites were Nephites.” Lamanite is a collective term here, rather than a tribal designation. It corresponds to an internal collective term “Nephite” that also is not a tribal designation. The way in which Jacob phrases this distinction may be instructive as well. The implication is of a greater number of Lamanites who can be distinguished from the Nephites only in that anyone who is not a Nephite can be summed up by the generic designation of “Lamanite.” Wayne A. Meeks, Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies at Yale University, notes that “the insider/outsider language invariably implies a negative perception of the outside society, even when the immediate function of the dualistic expressions is to reinforce the internal ordering of the group.”
We can see this same principle in action in the Old World as references to other peoples are mentioned in Egyptian documents. Donald B. Redford, professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, collected the terms that Egyptians used to refer to their neighbors in Palestine:
When, shortly before 3000 B.C. the appearance of the hieroglyphic writing system lifts the veil, the designations used by the Egyptians for their neighbors to the north can be seen to derive from personal observation, pejorative propaganda, geographic knowledge, and linguistic awareness. They called these northerners after the leather (?) costume that they had seen them wearing, thus “kilt wearers” or “kilties,” or “shoulder knot people” after the fashion they employed in supporting a jerkin by a tied band over the shoulder. Because of their proclivity to use the bow and arrow in their subsistence economy, “archers” or “people of the bow” were also appropriate terms. From their hostility toward Egyptian expeditionary forces, occasional brigandage along the frontier, the Egyptians occasionally designated them “the wild men of Asia,” a term that approaches in meaning and association our current term terrorist. Since they came from the north, “northerners” was an obvious appellative; but because they lived beyond the Sinai, “those-who-are-across-the-sand” also suggested itself.
None of these epithets are national descriptions. They are terms that allow the writer to categorize the Asiatics into a group without any reference to or acknowledgement of the names that they might have called themselves. Redford points out that even the term Hyksos, which is used as a description of a people is a Greek rendition of the Egyptian phrase for “foreign ruler.” The pejorative view of the foreigner is easily seen in the most common description of one who is “not Egyptian”: “vile.”
Similarly, even at this very early date, Lamanite has become a generic description of “not-Nephite” and the connotations are absolutely pejorative. The “Nephite = good/ Lamanite = bad” correlation is sufficiently well known from the Book of Mormon to need no documentation. Even modern readers quickly adopt this same attitude. The early social development of Nephite society was built on a natural geo-political/religious boundary that was reinforced by creating the insider/outsider terminology of “Nephite and Lamanite.” Of course, this terminology does not mean that all Lamanites actually were “bad”—only that, because of the necessary social distinctions developed within the Nephite community, all outsiders were seen negatively and labeled with this collective name of “Lamanites.”
Redford notes of the descriptions of Egypt’s enemies: “Although these scattered and unflattering representations of Asiatics might suggest a Palestine undeveloped and of meager importance, the archaeological picture rectifies this false impression.” As with the reality of archaeological Palestine compared to the Egyptian descriptions, we will find that the Lamanite reality will be quite different from the way the Nephites painted them.
Jacob’s information also communicates the fact that, within the larger community, a kin-based organization continued. Among the (collective) Nephites were specific kin divisions. This internal kin-based organization appears to have strong parallels in the Mesoamerican context. Formative sites already show evidence of internal organizations, according to Kent V. Flannery, a professor of archaeology at the University of Michigan: “Shortly after 600 B.C., the village of Moyotzingo, Puebla, was divided into at least two residential areas.… At Naranjito there seemingly were eastern and western residential areas.” While these early divisions also seem to be status-related, the principle of the internal divisions is the same. Later Maya political organizations also appear to have urban geographical distinctions based on hereditary clans.
The religious history of the Quiché, long post-dating the Book of Mormon, but perhaps indicative of tradition, also maintained clan divisions inside the larger polity. The Popul Vuh describes what seems to be a ceremonial meeting of clan heads in these terms:
They achieved glory there. Their marvelous seats and cushions were arranged; the varieties of splendor were sorted out for each one of the lords of the nine lineages. One by one they took their places:
The nine lords of the Cauecs.
The nine lords of the Greathouses.
The four lords of the Lord Quiches.
The two lords of the Zaquics.
They became numerous. Those who were in the following of a given lord were also numerous, but the lord came first, at the head of his vassals. There were masses, masses of lineages for each of the lords.
If we assume that Nephite kin organizations worked (at least eventually) in a reasonably Mesoamerican fashion, each would have had its patriarch and other leaders, responsible to and for the kin unit, and subject to the city’s ruler. The internal organization of these clans would be sufficient even in large cities to impose order and, I will argue, will explain the Nephite tribal descriptions after a general political collapse just before the visitation of the resurrected Savior (3 Ne. 7:14).