Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the "New Evangelization"

by Andrew Orta

Overview

Nearly five centuries after the first wave of Catholic missionaries arrived in the New World to spread their Christian message, contemporary religious workers in the Bolivian highlands have begun to encourage Aymara Indians to return to traditional ritual practices. All but eradicated after hundreds of years of missionization, the "old ways" are now viewed as local cultural expressions of Christian values. In order to become more Christian, the Aymara must now become more Indian.

This groundbreaking study of the contemporary encounter between Catholic missionaries and Aymara Indians is the first ethnography to focus both on the evangelizers and the evangelized. Andrew Orta explores the pastoral shift away from liberation theology that dominated Latin American missionization up until the mid-1980s to the recent "theology of inculturation," which upholds the beliefs and practices of a supposedly pristine Aymara culture as indigenous expressions of a more universal Christianity. Addressing essential questions in cultural anthropology, religious studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies, Catechizing Culture is a sophisticated documentation of the widespread shift from the politics of class to the politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231130684
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2004
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew Orta is associate professor of anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

What People are Saying About This

Thomas A. Abercrombie

What happens when the Catholic church in Bolivia reverses itself after 450 years and, in a policy move called 'theology of inculturation,' not only hands over missionary duties to Aymara catechists, but trains them to foster and revive, rather than to stamp out, sacrifical rites and 'native' shamanic practices? In this ambitious and innovative dual ethnography of missionizing priests and catechists and missionized Aymara communities, Orta sets a new standard for the study of both transnational process and the production of local worlds, tying the two together through a subtle analysis of embodied subjectivity and personhood. In Catechizing Culture, cutting-edge theory meets lively ethnographic narrative, and the reader is witness to the latest twists in the making of millennial Andean societies.

— Thomas A. Abercrombie, associate professor, anthropology, New York University

Editorial Reviews

A detailed and encompassing discussion.

Current Anthropology - Emma Cervone

A detailed and encompassing discussion.

— Emma Cervone

Current Anthropology