Suchergebnisse

This article examines the intersection of religious and sociopoliticalreform in contemporary highlands Bolivia. The case at issue is an Aymararegion, where the institutions, personnel and practices of Catholicism havelong been crucial to the production of local society. Over the lastdecades of the 20th century, a series of pastoral strategies initiated bythe Church have sought to localize Catholic practices through theempowerment of community-level catechists and, more recently, efforts toreclaim elements of Aymara culture as expressions of Catholicmeaning. These pastoral developments have overlapped with a set ofneoliberal political reforms aimed at decentralizing administrativepractices through the creation and empowerment of municipalities at thelocal level. I focus here on the experiences of one catechist to examinethe ways his career as a local agent of missionary Catholicism entangledhim directly within the sociopolitical processes being tested and stretchedby these neoliberal reforms.

This article compares the status of "culture" as a politically engaged concept in Franz Boas's time and in our own time. Taking a Boasian approach to "neo‐Boasianism," I examine the limits of this comparability in order to shed light on the nature of public culture‐talk today and to identify dimensions of the Boasian concept of "culture" particularly relevant to a contemporary anthropology.

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.