Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories

Jill Detemple

Description

Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories examines the ways in which religion and community development are closely intertwined in a rural part of contemporary Latin America. Using historical, documentary, and ethnographic data collected over more than a decade as an aid worker and as a researcher in central Ecuador, Jill DeTemple examines the forces that have led to this entanglement of religion and development and the ways in which rural Ecuadorians, as well as development and religious personnel, negotiate these complicated relationships.

Technical innovations have been connected to religious change since the time of the Inca conquest, and Ecuadorians have created defensive strategies for managing such connections. Although most analyses of development either tend to ignore the genuinely religious roots of development or conflate development with religion itself, these strategies are part of a larger negotiation of progress and its meaning in twenty-first-century Ecuador. DeTemple focuses on three development agencies—a liberationist Catholic women's group, a municipal unit dedicated to agriculture, and evangelical Protestant missionaries engaged in education and medical work—to demonstrate that in some instances Ecuadorians encourage a hybridity of religion and development, while in other cases they break up such hybridities into their component parts, often to the consternation of those with whom religious and development discourse originate. This management of hybrids reveals Ecuadorians as agents who produce and reform modernities in ways often unrecognized by development scholars, aid workers, or missionaries, and also reveals that an appreciation of religious belief is essential to a full understanding of diverse aspects of daily life.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Missions
• Christian Ministry
• Sustainable Development
• Philosophie et théologie
• Rural
• Sociology
• Minister (Christianity)
• Culture of Ecuador
• Rural area
• Latin America
• Christianity
• Development
• Ecuador
• Campagne

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268077778
• Langue: English

Extrait

CEMENT, EARTHWORMS, AND CHEESE FACTORIES
Religion and Community Development in Rural Ecuador
JILL D E TEMPLE
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu -->
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-268-07777-8 Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeTemple, Jill Michelle. Cement, earthworms, and cheese factories : religion and community development in rural Ecuador / by Jill DeTemple. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02611-0 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-268-07777-8 (e-book) 1. Ecuador—Church history. 2. Church work with the poor—Ecuador. 3. Community development—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Community development—Ecuador. I. Title. BR690.D48 2012 278.66'083—dc23 2012024894 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. -->
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
In memory of
Eve Carson, Marcos Lucio, and Ramiro Martinez.
Luchando, luchando.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE. “Things Both Good and Bad”: Religion and Development in Latin American Contexts
TWO. La Lucha : Negotiating Desire, Community, Religion, and Progress in San Marcos
THREE. Pedagogies of Power: Alternative Developments
FOUR. Good Housekeeping: Negotiating Religion and Development at Home
FIVE. Cement Things: Imagining Infrastructure, Community, and Progress
SIX. Spiritual Cardiology: Wholeness, Becoming, and (Dis)Integration
Conclusion: Truman’s Earthworms
Notes
Bibliography Index -->
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people and organizations in many places have made this book possible. In Ecuador, I am grateful to familia Martinez-Pacheco, who hosted me in my early days in the country, taught me Spanish, and became family. I also thank Carmen Bauz, who has given me shelter, warm tortillas, and unbounded enthusiasm for almost two decades, and the Lucio family, who have opened up their homes and lives in ways that have improved this work and made its existence feasible. I also thank Peace Corps–Ecuador, especially the headquarters and training staff, for allowing me to conduct research with a very fresh group of trainees. In the town I call San Marcos, I would like to extend special gratitude to the extensionists of the municipio, Santa Anita women’s cooperative members, and the missionaries I call Joyce Davis and Ruth Bauer. All of them were more than generous with their time and resources, enriching this work with their comments and suggestions, and my life with the stories of theirs.
In North Carolina I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my adviser, Ruel Tyson, Jr., and to Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Charlie Thompson, Orin Starn, and Randall Styers, who read the earliest versions of this work with humor, skill, and critical eyes, and who epitomize a truly helpful dissertation committee. Arturo Escobar acted as mentor and cheerleader, and I thank him for his support. I am also grateful to the Tinker Foundation, which funded initial research for this project, and to the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which awarded me a dissertation completion fellowship when I needed it most. Maryellen Davis-Collett, Phil Hassett, Kathryn Lofton, Tom Pearson, Nora Rubel, and David Shefferman made graduate life enriching and enjoyable. The Danger Girls—Celeste Gagnon, Miranda Hassett, Marsha Michie, and Quincy Newell—improved my writing, my thinking, and my sense of humor in ways various and deep. Eve Carson and Anna Lassiter gave me new eyes with which to see San Marcos. Hope Toscher and Myra Covington Quick held my hand, loved on my newborn, fed me chocolate, and pushed through paperwork in ways I still deem heroic. You truly are the pillars of the earth.
At Southern Methodist University I am grateful for a University Research Council grant that allowed me to do fieldwork in Ecuador. Thanks too to my remarkable set of colleagues in the Religious Studies Department. Bill Barnard, Rick Cogley, Mark Chancey, Johan Elverskog, Serge Frolov, John Lamoreaux, and Steven Lindquist have all read pieces of this manuscript and contributed to a uniquely collegial and supportive environment in which to see it through to its completion. Peggy Varghese and Kenitra Brown proved that the title “department assistant” is an understatement of epic proportions. Thanks to both of them for support ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary. Thanks also to my students, especially Katye Dunn, Erin Eidenshink, Katie Josephson, Wesleigh Ogle, Robert Perales, Lindsey Geist, and Luke Friedman, all of whom took a special interest in this project and made some real contributions to it in conversations both in and out of the classroom. At the University of Notre Dame Press, special thanks to Chuck Van Hof, who gave this book a chance; Robyn Karkiewicz, who handled more details than I can imagine; and to the anonymous reviewers who took extraordinary care in reading the manuscript. Rebecca DeBoer and Margo Shearman provided keen editorial eyes and ears as they made the text sing. This work is better because of all of you.
Finally, this book would not be possible without the continual support and sacrifice of my husband, Brian Bunge—partner in Ecuador, partner for life. My sister, Rachel, has been a constant cheerleader. My parents, Janet and Duane DeTemple, not only gave me wings but exhibited unusual courage in letting me use them. I hope to do the same for Molly and John, who have already discovered the joys and the magic of running with scissors.
INTRODUCTION
“So, are you an evangelical, or what?” It was a misty afternoon in 1996 in a small community high in the Ecuadorian mountains. Vicente, 1 a middle-aged Catholic farmer, had paused as we worked together on a composting project, squinting at me over shovels and small creatures wriggling in our hands. He was “just checking,” he explained after I assured him that I had no desire to change his religion. He had heard of other communities that had converted wholesale from Catholicism to Protestant Christianity in order to receive coveted development assistance—including water systems, microenterprises, and latrines—and he wanted to be sure that I wasn’t one of the suspected evangelicals, using earthworms to win his soul. My curiosity piqued, I asked other people in the community if they had heard of evangelical Christians offering aid for conversion and came to learn that Vicente was not alone in his fears. “The Protestants!” one woman exclaimed as we sorted corn seed on her front porch, “They’re taking over [ conquistando ] the world!” 2
These comments, and countless others that I would hear from campesinos in Ecuador’s Bolívar province as a development worker and later as a researcher, reflect rural Ecuadorians’ keen awareness of changes in the religious makeup of Latin America which have marked the past thirty years. Since the 1980s Protestant Christian denominations, especially evangelical and Pentecostal churches, have attracted increasing numbers of Latin Americans. Brazil, almost exclusively Roman Catholic in 1970, is now less than 90 percent Roman Catholic, and 46.6 percent of Christians identify as charismatic or Pentecostal. Ecuador, which had virtually no Protestant population in 1970 (1.4 percent), is now approximately 93 percent Roman Catholic, and the church is both growing more charismatic and losing about 2 percent of its adherents per year. 3 With such rapid change under way, Viche had a reason to query the religious status of the earthworms and their potential to be linked to conversion.
But Vicente’s question also points to other changes that Ecuadorians have experienced as citizens of a “developing” country that receives approximately $60 million in U.S. foreign assistance annually, and which is home to more than one hundred NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) dedicated to development work. 4 The “boom” of NGOs engaged in overseas projects came after the end of the “development decades” of the 1950s–80s, when development was primarily under the auspices of government programs that emphasized national economic strategies, programs and restructuring. The increase in NGOs also reflects a shift in development strategies to more localized and “needs based” endeavors administered by local organizations. These trends have opened the door for faith-based organizations to become primary points of contact between the recipients of development and aid programs and the government donors that regularly fund them. 5
While Vicente’s question and the remarks of the woman on the porch point to recent situations in which religion and development have become entangled in donor agencies and sites of reception, the woman’s comment offhandedly invoking the Conquest of the New World by Spanish forces evokes a much longer entanglement of religion and development. I was surprised at Vicente’s question because I believed myself to be in Ecuador holding earthworms and fielding questions about my religious motivations because of what I saw as a secular system of international assistance launched at the end of the Second World War. Vicente’s question, however, points to a longer and more complicated history that has mixed religious change and technological innovation from times before Europeans set foot in the Americas. It also highlights religion, development, and their confluence in rural areas as spaces in which Ecuadorians and other actors in the “developing” world negotiate the contours of that world.
These negotiations, constitutive of modernity, simultaneously refute the secularization model of 1960s