"Living the Past Another Way:" Reinstrumentalized Missionary Selves in Aymara Mission Fields

This article examines Catholic missionaries in the Bolivian highlands. I focus on missionary conversion accounts-narratives of self-transformation in the face of their local mission fields-taking these as an analytic opportunity to address the positions of such global agents as component subjects of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Anthropological quarterly 2002-09, Vol.75 (4), p.707-743
Main Author: Orta, Andrew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Christianity
Andean languages
Catholicism
Christian history
Christian missionaries
Communities
Ethnography
Ethnology
Ideology
Missionaries
Negotiation
Priests
Religion, magic, witchcraft
Religions, beliefs, worships
Religious missions
Religious practices
Stoler, Ann Laura
Theology
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Summary:This article examines Catholic missionaries in the Bolivian highlands. I focus on missionary conversion accounts-narratives of self-transformation in the face of their local mission fields-taking these as an analytic opportunity to address the positions of such global agents as component subjects of Aymara locality. Negotiating preexisting expectations of Catholicism and its representatives as necessary for the reproduction of local Aymara social life as well as emerging pastoral ideologies with their own expectations of indigenous locality, the self-transformation experienced by missionaries in the field asserts a reinstrumentalized missionary self as a plausible translocal subject.
ISSN:0003-5491
1534-1518
1534-1518
DOI:10.1353/anq.2002.0065