Missionary Selves - PDF

LIVING THE PAST ANOTHER
WAY: Reinstrumentalized
Missionary Selves in Aymara
Mission Fields
Andrew Orta
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This article examines Catholic missionaries in the Bolivian highlands. I focus on mis-
sionary conversion accountsnarratives of self-transformation in the face of their
local mission fieldstaking these as an analytic opportunity to address the posi-
tions 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 plau-
sible translocal subject. [missionization, Catholicism, locality, Aymara, Bolivia,
South America]
Introduction
In the beginning of [1984] I went through a very strong crisis in the sense
of my work and my vocation and I came through it because of a blessing
that I could transform, I could understand the...my problem. In this case
it wasnt so much a problem of where I was. O.K., I didnt understand
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LIVING THE PAST ANOTHER WAY
where I was, I was working with complete devotion, but I brought with me
in my work, in my vision, the experience I had from a different culture.
And in 1984, thanks to God I discovered that the methodology of [pas-
toral] work is different, that I need to be different, and that the cultural
environment, the dynamic, the calendar is different from the society I
come from [...] I changed my method of work, my way of seeing the
Aymara themselves, and this helped me very much.
The speaker is Miguel, a Polish priest of the Society of the Divine Word, ac-
tive since the early 1980s in missionary work among Aymara-speaking com-
munities of the Bolivian highlands. I interviewed Miguel some 6 years after the
personal crisis he is recounting, a moment he had come to see as something of
a conversion experience. He continued:
I underwent a personal transformation, a conversion, not in the moral sense

or at the level of faith [...] Ive always tried to be a believing priest [laughs] not
simply an administrative cleric [...] I believe I underwent a transformation at
the personal, the human, and even the charismatic level [...] I withdrew to the
mountains for one week. I was about to leave the mission, and my continu-
ation as a religioso and as a priest was in question [...] So I withdrew with my
pack and my tent to the mountain to pass a few days in the desert before
making my decision, to have this contact with myself and with God. And
there I discovered as a symbol of what I carried with me, of what I had been,
the watch. It was like a symbol, and from that moment I left the watch be-
hind, because my problem was the entire dimension of time, the entire in-
dustrialized society. I couldnt understand, for example, why the Aymara
didnt come to Mass on Sunday, why they didnt come on time. It was a com-
plete focus of what had been my other life.
*****
In the course of a larger ethnographic project examining Catholic missionaries,

Aymara catechists and the Aymara communities they serve in contemporary
Bolivia, I found myself repeatedly collecting accounts of personal crisis and
transformation from a range of missionary consultants.1 Sometimes these
emerged in formal recorded interviews, sometimes they were shared during
more informal settingsin the course of long jeep rides to communities in
their parish, over meals at the parish housesometimes they were offered as ad-
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ANDREW ORTA
vice: personal parables from one fieldworker to another. As I came increasingly

to wrestle methodologically and conceptually with missionaries and other for-
eign agents as component subjects of local Aymara ethnography, I came to see
a section of my field notes I had labeled missionary conversions as one point
of vantage onto this translocal alchemy.
This article is about the ways missionaries are coimplicated in the production
of Andean locality, and about what such a view of locality as an emergent prod-
uct of both local and translocal agents might mean for our understanding of the
Andes and comparable contexts elsewhere. I proceed at once in debt and in
counterpoint to some classic and more recent discussions of missionization in
Latin America and elsewhere, and to more general discussions of colonial situ-
ations and contact zones. While these have certainly called productive atten-
tion to the local complexities of colonial practices, I suggest that they have also
ultimately rested on a premise of an analytically discrete, a priori indigenous lo-
cality at the capillary endpoints of the global processes and translocal subjects
that engage it. I shall return below to Father Miguel and to the cases of other mis-
sionaries to examinewith a nod to Max Gluckmanthe position of such mis-
sionaries as coparticipants in a single social situation.
I am interested in detailing the presupposability of such translocal strangers
for other participants in local social worlds, their integral involvement in prac-
tices seen by locals as necessary for the reproduction of such social orders,
and the ways such expectations condition missionary practices. At the same
time, I am interested in the ways missionaries negotiate specific conceptual-
izations of locality implicit in dominant evangelical ideologies, calibrating
what they take to be transcendent meaning with their experiences of the lo-
cality in which they are entangled. Conversions such as Father Miguels, I argue,
reveal the ideological and practical techniques by which missionaries strive to
constitute themselves as plausible local subjects in ways at once accountable
to the conjunctural constraints of their immediate situation and authorized by
dominant evangelical ideologies. Borrowing as an analogical model sociolin-
guistic treatments of the ways speakers achieve (relative) interactional coher-
ence in the course of an unfolding encounter, I seek a sense of missionaries as
constrained and compelled by a comparable goal. I take Miguels conversion
and additional field research with missionaries as an opportunity to examine
some of the strategies by which foreign missionaries in the Andes make sense
of themselves within and with respect to their mission fields, and more broad-
ly as an opportunity to explore what insights missionaries as ethnographic
subjects and the complex translocal interactions in which they are engaged of-
709
fer to anthropologists wrestling to reconceptualize the sites and scales of

ethnographic practice.
Missionary revival
For some decades now the anthropology of missionaries has been in a state of
revival, punctuated by the regular appearance of edited collections, free-stand-
ing essays, and monographs heralding the new salience of missionary activity,
conversion to Christianity, or local Christianity, and typically prophesying a future
of scholarly labor on the topic (e.g., Barker 1990, Beidelman 1974, 1982,
Boutilier, Hughes and Tiffany 1978, Comaroff and Comaroff 1986, Hefner 1993,
Huber 1987, 1988, Schneider and Lindenbaum 1987). To some degree, this re-
sponds to shifting empirical challenges: the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin
America, Africa, or Oceania (e.g., Boudewijnes, Droogers and Kamsteeg 1998;
Meyer 1994; Stoll 1990, Robbins 2001), the explicitly Christian tradition of
emerging nation-states in Melanesia (Barker 1990, Douglas 2001, White 1991),
shifting institutional pastoral strategies such as those unfolding in the wake of
the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church (e.g., Burdick 1993, Orta
1995, 1998). The persistence and resurgence of religious phenomena has chal-
lenged once prevalent assumptions about modernity and modernization and
compelled additional research (cf. Hefner 1998).
But the lure of missionaries for anthropologists indexes other sorts of dis-
ciplinary concerns. The intensifying self-scrutiny of anthropologists over the
1970s and 1980s and concern over the ambiguous position of anthropologists
within colonial regimes gave an uncomfortable edge to a long-standing rival-
ry between anthropologists and missionaries. Increasing attention to colonial
history and the agents of colonialism as ethnographically complex subjects
(e.g., Stoler 1989; Stoler and Cooper 1997) developed alongside a number of
ethnohistorical studies of colonial missionization (e.g., Beidelman 1981, 1982,
Rafael 1988, Comaroff and Comaroff 1991-7, Ranger 1993, Huber 1988,
Schrder 1999).2Research on missionaries and conversion to world religions
(or, more recently, global religions) has also served to scratch a related dis-
ciplinary itch. This concerns themes of cultural change and resistance to
dominant power, voiced increasingly over the past decade in terms of the im-
pact of globalization and the localization or indigenization of global phe-
nomena (e.g., Robbins 2001, cf. Schieffelin 1981). Across this set of topical
trends, the themes of missionization, conversion, and syncretism have been
repeatedly born again. As far as the anthropology of missionization goes, most
scholars would agree, the end is not near.
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ANDREW ORTA
There is another form of agreement across much of this scholarship. Scholars

concerned with missionization have tended analytically to reinscribe oppositions
between local and global, indigenous and foreign. This has been particularly fate-
ful in the ethnographic context with which I am most familiar: Latin America and
especially the Andean region, where the narrative of colonial evangelical en-
counter has often been told as a story of partial merging yielding an enduring
core of indigenous tradition extending across the colonial and postcolonial cen-
turies.3More broadly, and as a number of recent treatments of the topic have not-
ed (e.g., Griffiths 1999; Mills 1997; Taylor 1996), scholarship on missionization
and conversion in Latin America has tended to trade in relatively unidirection-
al, zero-sum models of encounter in which Christianity and indigenous religion
were stable and mutually exclusive alternatives. Syncretic transformations of
local religious practices are thus cast as imperfect composites, symptoms of
evangelical failure and/or indigenous resistance (cf. Stewart and Shaw 1994;
van der Veer 1994, Taylor 1996:53). The actions of the evangelizers and the re-
actions of the natives in this view seem to stage a space of encounter that for-
ever parses into its discrete components.
This is also evident in work from other world areas, where scholars, paying
fruitful attention to the localization of global religious phenomena, have un-
derscored the local agency through which people [give] autochthonous form to
the civilizing processes that were transforming them (Lattas 1998:xxi). In a sim-
ilar vein, John Barker (1990:2) writes, [t]o form an authentic part of the religious
experience of Oceanic peoples, Christianity must enter into local world-views, as-
pirations, and concerns of Pacific islanders within their particular socio-histori-
cal circumstances (see also White 1991).
Ranger (1993) has noted comparable tendencies in the Africanist literature,
where colonial religious encounter has classically been framed as an engagement
of microcosmic (and limited) traditional religions with macrocosmic religions.
Conversion is thus cast as a shifting of worldview lenses, correlated with shifting
scales of experience and concern prompted by colonialism, nation-building,
and, we might add, globalization (see also Horton 1967, 1982). Ranger deftly un-
settles this bifocal binary, pointing out that traditional African religions could be
macrocosmic. There is a certain polemical sleight of hand here strategically
conflating local and traditional religions, but the point is important and un-
derscored by more ethnographically based discussions in Africa (e.g., Geschiere
1997, Comaroff and Comaroff 1991-7, and Piot 1999) and elsewhere (e.g. van der
Veer 1994b). Ranger also notes that missionary practices are themselves nu-
anced and localized, reflecting both the contextual particularities of missionary
711
field situations and complex convergences of personal biographies and the

evolving doctrinal and institutional histories of Churches and mission societies
(see also Beidelman 1974 for similar points). These insights are similarly con-
firmed by the few ethnographic and ethnohistorical treatments focused on mis-
sionaries as cultural subjects in their own right (e.g., Huber 1988, Comaroff and
Comaroff 1991-7, Beidelman 1982).
My point is not to criticize this ethnographic attention to the localization of
global processes. The particularizing promise of anthropology is its greatest asset,
all the more so at a moment when the primary challenges to the discipline involve
integrating ethnography across multiple scales of analysis to examine the ways in
which macrocosmic modernities [are] at once singular and plural, specific
and general, parochial and global in their manifestations (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1997:6). My concern here is less with analytic attention to processes of
localization than with the mistakenly corollary assumptions about locality that en-
able it. Missionaries, for instance, repeatedly remain analytically discrete from the
locale wherein they serve, partible participants in a long embrace (cf. Comaroff
and Comaroff 1991), engaged in a conversation in which their local interlocu-
tors consistently scramble the message (Stoler and Cooper 1997:7, cf. Rafael
1988). And while this has certainly yielded a more nuanced understanding of colo-
nial and global processes and complicated dominant characterizations of moder-
nity, it also forfeits a number of other insights offered by the ethnographic study
of missionaries in situ: the complex nature of locality within translocal colonial
and postcolonial settings, and the contentious coherence of these multi-sided and
multi-sited conversations, conversations that, for all their misunderstandings and
failed translations, continue to engage their participants. Thus while the analyt-
ic threshing of global missionaries from the local missionized may be accurate his-
torically for such settings (missionary Catholicism is, after all, typically a discrete,
foreign and relatively recent arrival within such local social worlds), the corollary
of an analytically distinct and a priori locality is posited for contemporary cir-
cumstances with considerable risk insofar as it stages a never-ending first contact
and upstages an ensemble production that is well past its first act.
A related risk involves efforts to attend to the internal dynamics and dialectics
of colonialism and other global phenomena. Work in this vein has fruitfully re-
versed the arrows of influence, and drawn important attention to the self-fash-
ioning of the West as this is inextricably bound up with the Wests involvement
with colonial Others (Coronil 1996, Mignolo 2001, cf. Eliott 1970). The phenom-
ena of missionary conversion might well be located hereshifting missionary un-
derstandings of their own western selfhood emerge in the context of relations
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ANDREW ORTA
with missionized Others. Yet many of these discussions have retained an abstract
view of colonialism and globalization premised upon a separation of metropole
and margin, or examining their overlap in heuristic (buffering) models of contact
zones (Pratt 1992) that continue to posit a capillary locality prior to and discrete
from the global flows that engage it.4 Again, it seems to me that such framings risk
reviving the binaries they otherwise would unsettle.
In my view, the phenomena of missionization present a prime documentary
and analytic opportunity to take up these issues with a degree of ethnographic
thickness, an opportunity to examine translocal processes as they are embodied
and localized. For missionizationarguably the mother of all global phenom-
enaentails a hyper-localization of global processes, as missionaries typically en-
gage in long-term residence in their mission fields. What is more, and as I have
argued elsewhere in more detail for the Aymara case (e.g., Orta 1999), mission-
ization also necessarily entails a direct engagement with a host of practices
some esoteric, many quite quotidianinvolved in the ongoing production of
local life worlds, and so participates in the generation of a context in which the
most apparently local practices reference and presuppose translocal entangle-
ments (see also Errington and Gewertz 1995; Piot 1999). While on the one hand,
missionization seems to be richly productive of the sorts of binaries that are the
ceaseless product of colonial and postcolonial social formations, it is also a pri-
mary lens onto a host of empirically situated practices and processes that con-
found these binaries and illuminate the open-ended emergence of a porous,
entangled locality.5
Missionaries and the local

This essay aims to seize this opportunity through a discussion of contemporary
Catholic missionization in the Andes. Narratives of missionary self-transformation
such as Miguels illuminate the lived local experiences of missionaries and un-
derscore the entanglement of missionaries as component subjects of local
Aymara experience. I take Miguels conversion as an opportunity to examine
some of the strategies by which foreign missionaries constitute themselves as
plausible evangelizing subjects within mission fields, the ways they imagine the
Aymara as their interactants, and the ways these identities become routinized
and presupposable. My discussion will proceed through three intersecting points.
First, in situations of long-term missionary engagement, missionaries be-
come presupposable and necessary strangers within local frames of reference.
They are foreigners and still familiar to the Aymara, feared and despised by
some and yet their presence is part of the generally presumed local order of
713
things. Moreover, and as generations of pastoral workers have discovered to

their frustration, this presupposability and necessity constrain missionary prac-
tices and harness them to a variety of activities integral to the production and
maintenance of indigenous locality. By production of locality I refer to the
practices by which actors constitute local fields of experience as more or less co-
herent worlds. Rather than a priori givens, such local worlds are the ephemeral
products of hard and continuous work (cf. Appadurai 1995, Miller 1995). In this
regard, missionaries participate in (and are required for) the production of
Aymara locality through their involvement in local ritual practices that range
from naming and morally authorizing new social persons in baptisms, to facili-
tating beneficial exchange relations between living and dead Aymara, to re-
newing local social orders through participation in community-level festivals
dedicated to Catholic saints.
This is not to suggest that missionaries merely dance to the tune of the colonial
Catholic legacy or to preexisting local expectations of them. This is my second point:
far from inert component subjects of locality, missionaries and other strangers are
themselves directly involved and interested in its production. For, just as locality is
not unproblematically already there for indigenous locals, but must be sustained
and generated by present and future oriented workand typically in ways that en-
tail situating and referencing a host of translocal actors (missionaries, government
officials, aid workers, etc.)neither is it already there for the strangers who engage
it. The day-to-day practices of circuit-riding, fiesta-celebrating missionaries must al-
so be seen as constitutive of locality with respect to other translocal vantages: from
the administrative concerns of the nation-state (for whom the local communities
are also juridical entities, and the Church (one of a number of NGOs whose activ-
ities help effect the sorts of neoliberal decentralization in vogue in places like
Bolivia over the past two decade), to the universalizing ideology of missionary
Catholicism (which, in varying ways at varying times, has sought to locate dis-
parate localities with a singular vision of a transcendent church).
Such foreign agents, then, tend to have their own axes to grind locality-wise;
implicitly or explicitly they are involved in asserting their own vision of locality and
their place within it Indeed, a useful gloss of missionization might be as an in-
tervention in the production of locality and in the production of the subjects
locals and strangers alikewhose practices ceaselessly remake locality and align
it with local and translocal frames of meaning and power. I have discussed these
sorts of practices and the interactions between Aymara and foreign missionaries
in greater ethnographic detail elsewhere (Orta 1995, 1998, 1999; in press). Taking
as my present point of departure the phenomena of missionary conversions,
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ANDREW ORTA
my focus here is more precisely on the missionaries themselves and the ways their
involvement and investment in the production of locality (on terms never fully of
their making) compel, in ways that interact with dominant missionary ideologies
and local presuppositions, the reinstrumentalization of missionary selves as plau-
sible local subjects. To return to the case of Father Miguel, I want to examine the
ways such narratives of missionary conversion create and assert a particular kind
of locality as a space for missionary practice through a corresponding refiguring
of the missionary self. Miguels conversion involves his negotiating, within the con-
straints of an ongoing space of missionary-Aymara entanglement, a subject po-
sition enabling his participation in locality in ways that are authorized by and
authorize a specific pastoral ideology. I address contemporary Catholic mission-
ization and the shifting discourses and practices of Aymara locality entailed by
shifting pastoral strategies as a window onto this process.6
My third point concerns the nature of the locality thus produced, which in
the material I have collected is marked by a reciprocal self-consciousness across
a range of positions within locality, as subjects see themselves as they imagine
others see them. This sort of intersubjective commensurability is a condition of
the possibility of missionization, which requires a belief in the successful cir-
culation or translation of meanings across differing social and often linguistic
points of view (cf. Rafael 1988, Povinelli 2001). It has also been signaled as a
characteristic of the global ecumene, cast by Hannerz (1992) as a dense network
of takings into account that situate locality within a range of translocal per-
spectives. But it may also be taken as a dimension of all social practice. Charles
Taylor (1985; cf. Hallowell 1955) stresses self-interpreting self-awareness as a
condition of personhood. Similarly, through work on indexicality and related
features of language that function in part to establish a more or less shared
here and now context as a presupposable point of reference for situated in-
teractants, sociolinguists call attention to the ways all communicative acts re-
quire the achievement, however fleeting or unstable, of relatively shared frames
of meaning in the face of indeterminacy and incommensurability (e.g., Duranti
and Goodwin 1992, Percy 1958, Povinelli 2001). As a focus of study, mission-
ization moves us across these global and micro-sociological levels and both
requires us to situate such interactional achievements with respect to colonial
and postcolonial histories, and warns us against abstracting colonial and post-
colonial histories from the highly local encounters in which they are made.
Sociolinguists concerned with indexicality write of shifters: terms such as
here, this, or you that are semantically underspecified and require an ex-
plicit engagement with the intersubjective context of their use for their refer-
715
ential success (Silverstein 1976). I will argue below that missionary conversion
narratives and correlated practices function in similar ways, invoking and indeed
redefining missionary selves and practices in local contexts in a way that pro-
duces intersubjective commensurability within these unfolding historical and
ideological constraints.
The Everyday Forms of the Mission Life (1)

In November of 1990 I traveled with Miguels colleagues, Father Jan and Sister
Marta. Snug in a late model Toyota Landrover, we whizzed down the Pan-
American highway on our way to the parish of Peas, a colonial town tucked
in the foothills that rise into the Cordillera Real east of the altiplano. Behind
us was the parish of Batallas, where the priest and nun resided with their re-
spective communities.7
Jan was relatively new to altiplano pastoral work. He had arrived in Bolivia
after a year of service in his orders mission in Paraguay. He was clearly un-
comfortable in his newest post. In an interview with me the day before, he ex-
pressed some frustration with the lack of spontaneity he found in highlanders
as compared to his previous flock in Paraguay. He also repeated a lament I
heard from many pastoral agents concerning the excessive value Aymara place
on sacraments: fiestas, masses, etc. Blaming the work of his colonial prede-
cessors, he complained the gospel message of liberation has not arrived in a
profound way in the heart of the Aymara people. We must learn the lan-
guage, recuperate Aymara cultural elements, he continued, [and] use them for
a more profound evangelization.
With the assistance of Marta, Jan found the turn-off to Peas and we left the
highway for a rutted dirt road that put the Landrover to good use as we bounced
and turned our way into the foothills. The mass was to commemorate two
deaths in the parish. There was also a request for Jan to visit and bless a near-
by site where lightning had recently struck, killing some livestock and injuring
two young herders. When we arrived, a large crowd was waiting in the parish
office, many of them hoping to obtain certificates of baptism. Jan and Marta en-
tered and began the laborious process of issuing the certificates. Each petition
had to be confirmed against Church records: multi-volume libros sacramen-
tales kept under lock in the parish office. Solicitants paid 8 Bolivianos (app.
US$2.00) for a new certificate, signed by the priest. Such certificates are neces-
sary for Church as well as civil functions (e.g., marriage) and are often the clos-
est thing to a birth certificate available.8
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ANDREW ORTA
We then entered the church where Jan, with the assistance of local cate-
chists, presided over a crowded mass. The mass completed, Jan, Marta, and I
made our way back to the Landrover to return to Batallas. (At some point, Jan
had decided not to visit the site of the lightning strike. It may be that the work
of issuing certificates put him behind schedule, though the reasons were not
clear to me.) Marta noted that many Aymara were upset that Jan did not repeat
the names of the dead several times during the liturgy. Thats all they want to
hear, she observed disapprovingly.9 Outside the church, Aymara swarmed
around Jan and Marta with various requests: late petitions for certificates of
baptism, invitations to meetings, and requests for additional Masses. Women
from a nearby community were forming a Club de Madres (Womens [lit.
Mothers] club). One of the women asked Marta to come to an upcoming or-
ganizational meeting where the women would select the groups first leader.
Marta was upset by what she saw as a last minute request. If you tell me in
time, she scolded angrily, I can come. But now it is too late: my calendar is all
filled. As we climbed into the car, people continued to call out requests to Jan
and Marta. Jan eased the car through the pressing crowd as some trotted along-
side, palms pressed to the windows of the Landrover, imploring the priest and
nun for attention to their requests. As we made our way back to Battallas, Jan
muttered angrily, these Aymara are like children!
So went a formal observation of missionaries in the field early in my own
field research. I have selected this vignette for the everydayness of it. There is
no syncretic ritual spectacle, though I will confess to a real disappointment that
Jan put off his visit to the scene of the lightning strike. There are no secret sac-
rifices in the shadows of the Church, though such masses are but a part of a set
of practices involved in remembering the dead. There is no stark confrontation
between missionary and Indian. The final press of bodies is dramatic and was,
perhaps, frightening to a recently arrived priest. But for the most part, it seemed
merely annoying: the pragmatics of Aymara politeness in such situations call for
a wheedling, whining tone. They scrambled and pushed to make contact with
the priest and nun, or impassively watched the scene unfold and compelled it
to continue by crowding in front of us or with their feet by one of the wheels of
the jeep. Jan and Marta did not abuse the Aymara. There were no epithets
shouted, none of the crowd was pushed or hit.
This is not to minimize the frustrations of Jan, recently arrived in a strange
mission field, or the hint of amusement I sometimes detected in the more sea-
soned Martas observations of her new co-worker. And I want to be careful not
to overlook a real apprehension on the part of some Aymara making requests
717
of the priest, nor to deny a whiff of the weapons of the weak (Scott 1985) in the
crush of bodies that penned in the Landrover. This was certainly not a seamless
social situation; there were elements of misunderstanding and incommensura-
bility in the mass, which failed to fulfill local desires to have their dead remem-
bered by having their names more frequently intoned. Nonetheless, I want to
situate Jan, Marta, and the Aymara they mean to serve as reciprocally presup-
posable components of an integral sociohistorical formation, and underscore the
extent to which locally constitutive practicesranging from the commemoration
of the dead to the formation of mothers groupsgenerate and reference a
skein of translocal entanglements.
But stressing the integrity of this sociohistorical formation and the compli-
cated and coimplicated positions of the missionaries and Aymara within it need
not mask the power relations that suffuse it. To argue that the situated produc-
tion of locality references and renders coherent an entangled social order is
not to claim that local actors make the world as they wish, nor that they (or I) ap-
prove of the world they reference and reproduce. As we glimpse in this brief vi-
gnette, this routinized encounter itself references and performs bureaucratic
power asymmetries congealed in the documentation missionaries control
documentation that can enable or disable interactions with the Bolivian state.10
Similarly, mothers clubs11 are vital channels for assistance from the Church and
other NGOs, which often insist on indigenous communities constituting them-
selves (or at least presenting themselves) in specific ways. The imprimatur of
Sister Marta is not strictly necessary for the club to form, but the request for her
presence suggests that Marta and the powers she represents serve as something
of an implicit audience for the act of forming a mothers club.
And as for Jan, struggling with the challenges of his new mission post, he is
left to reconcile through a continuing string of everyday mission experiences the
patent necessity of his presence in the eyes of his Aymara flock, the culture
friendly goals of the pastoral ideology informing his Orders work, and his reve-
latory reaction to the Aymara as like children. It is with the crafting and en-
acting of (trans)locally meaningful subject positions within local fields of practice
that I am principally concerned here.
The Constraints of Conjuncture: Missionary Rebirth

in the Andes
As missionaries become components of (indigenous) locality, they are in-
creasingly constrained by pre-existing expectations of them, and often com-
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ANDREW ORTA
plicit in acts beyond their control and intent. The recent (post World War II) 12
history of Catholic pastoral work in the Andean region, illustrates this in strik-
ing ways.
In 1955 a young priest named Jacques Monast arrived in Bolivia to begin
service in the southern altiplano province of Carangas. Monast was one of a
group of Canadian Oblates who arrived as part of a wave of post-War Catholic
missionary activity in Latin America. This was the start of what many in the
Church today refer to as the second or new evangelization. In a series of pub-
lished works Monast (1966, 1969, 1972) presents both an insightful ethno-
graphic account of Aymara society at this time and an eloquent testimony of his
own transformations as a result of his pastoral experiences. Monast was clear-
ly not your run of the mill priest. Yet his reflections well condense the salient
issues of the times, perhaps because he was one step ahead of them. If one ob-
serves a missionary recently arrived in a strange land, he wrote,
We see that he finds himself in a state of wonder. He feels limited or dis-

turbed by a number of things he is not used to and, in some cases,
which he does not even know. He comes from the other side: he is a
messenger, and carrier of a News for a people that is not even a people
of God. He knows that to be understood he will need to translate his
message not only into the words, but in addition and above all into the
mentality of the recipients.
In this way, the missionary has the impression that he must learn about
life all over again, starting from zero. He knows Christian dogma or moral
principles well, but he is ignorant of almost everything about the people
to whom he will direct himself. Thus he attempts to be born again, if he
wants the Word to be effective (1972:253).
But the wonder of Catholic pastoral workers in Bolivia went beyond the
stock missionary experience of otherness. This was not an evangelical frontier.
The Aymara had been evangelized for nearly four centuries. Priests such as
Monast arriving from Europe or North America found themselves confronted
with neither an unconverted Other, nor a more familiar Catholicism in crisis
of a sort they might have experienced in the United States, Europe, or perhaps
urban areas of Latin America, where the Church found itself grappling in-
creasingly with the challenges of modernity. The missionary rebirth in the
Bolivian altiplano was through an encounter with the familiar made strange,
an encounter in which the translators of the Good News found themselves al-
719
ready understood as old news, an encounter already framed by a history of

transcultural entanglements.
Relating his thoughts on his first night spent in the altiplano parish of Corque
(Carangas Province), sleeping on improvised cots in the ruined presbytery and lis-
tening to the rats eating his provisions, Monast writes:
The missions!, I said to myself. How many centuries have I gone back in
a single day? How far do I find myself from civilization, from that well or-
ganized Church of our country? The rats continued their nightly rounds. If
we had at least arrived in a new country, to a truly unharvested field. But
no: I am in a very Catholic country. In this presbytery in ruins! (1972:255).
Though he arrived presupposing a recognizable, commensurable Catholic

identity, Monast quickly realizes that his training, his words, are insufficient to
bridge the gulf he experiences between himself and the Aymara Catholics of
Corque. For their part, however, the Aymara professed a vibrant Catholic iden-
tity and quickly press the young priest into ritual service. Monasts initial bewil-
derment soon turns into helpless frustration as he is sought out for baptisms and
fiesta masses, offended and enraged by the sequence of ritual celebrations in
which he is an unwitting but crucial participant.
An elderly sacristan from Corque of about 60 years of age assisted with the
mass, dressed in a red cassock (imported, no doubt, by the Spaniards
from the earliest times). He performed all of the ceremonies he could re-
member and murdered his Latin with the impertinence and disrespectful
familiarity of a choirboy
As soon as the young missionary begins to exercise his ministry in
Carangas, the poetry with which he had gilded his missionary and priestly
ideals gives way quickly to prose. The first time that my services were re-
quired for baptism, I dont know how many godparents and babied gathered
respectfully around the baptismal fonts. I had spent much time preparing
all of the details of the liturgy of baptism; I wanted to offer a beneficial cat-
echism for those in attendance. Precisely at the beginning of the ceremony,
one of the little ones began to cry from hunger; it was necessary to bring him
quickly to his mother, who offered him her breast in the doorway of the
Church. Another of the aspirants to baptism broke out in furious howling as
soon as he saw the face of the priest; he only refrained from his aggressions
after the final amen. Two of the godparents were drunk. At any rate, I felt
720
ANDREW ORTA
that my methods of evangelization were of little use; the babies and the
godparents attracted everyones attention, such that my words did not seem
to reach anyone. My questions did not receive a single answer
In the first months, they called me to preside over a fiesta mass, and I
spent the week in the town in question. We can now describe in an objec-
tive way the development of a fiesta; but when a young missionary with in-
nocent eyes sees this for the first time, his blood boils: the statue, the
banner, the orgies, the battles When he surprises the sorcerer in the midst
of his work; when he realizes that the animal sacrifices are linked to the sac-
rifice of the mass, he says to himself: this is the Old Testament! and he won-
ders what absurd relation his ministry has with these sacrifices (ibid: 256f.)
Monast finds himself in a parish house in ruins. His encounter is with what he
perceives to be a degraded echo of a past evangelization. What is more, his
presence entangles him in that very degradation. In an ironic twist on Trexlers
(1984) observation that colonial Catholic missionaries sought to induce the na-
tives to perform the colonial imagination, Monast, like other missionaries of
his time, finds himself performing the Aymara-Catholic imagination. He is as-
sisted by an aging Aymara sacristan, who, dressed in a cassock he imagines to be
of colonial origins, embodies the syncretic colonial Catholicism that Monast
confronts. He hears the faithful chant prayers in a barely recognizable Latin. He
celebrates mass, but finds that through his actions he has a meaning beyond his
comprehension and control. Moreover, his efforts to engage the Aymara, to
communicate (contemporary) verbal meanings are fruitless: his words do not
reach them; his questions go unanswered.
New alters for old altars?

The sense of the Catholic Church as embarked upon a new or second evan-
gelization in Latin America is a familiar one in pastoral circles, intoned in rural
courses, in diocesan planning meetings, in papal statements, in the published
writings of theologians, and in scholarly discussions of the Latin American
Church. The term references a contemporary period of reanimation in the
Church, dating from the 1950s, accelerated by the opening of the Second
Vatican Council (1962-65) and enabled in large measure by the coalescence of the
Latin American Church as evident in key meetings of the Latin American
Episcopal Conference in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
This reanimation was closely linked with the geographic and cultural politics
of the post World War II period. The initial pastoral push evident in the 1950s co-
721
incided with a broader effort by the Church to reinforce its standing in the emerg-
ing post-War world order, particularly with respect to the new Third World
(Bhlmann 1978, McDonough 1992:218)13. Pius XIIs encyclical Fidei Donum
(1957) calling for renewed missionary activity in postcolonial Africa also herald-
ed a new missionary era in Latin America (Jord 1981:26; Bhlmann 1978). The
foreign Catholic missionaries who began arriving in the Andes were responding
to a crisis of local and global, institutional and epochal dimensions. They were al-
so engaged at the local level in a set of practices that would serve to produce and
align Andean locality within this new global framing, in which Latin America
and similar places became newly defined alters to a newly defined modernity (cf.
Coronil 1996, Escobar 1995, Pletsch 1981). Through pastoral movements such as
Catholic Action, church agents sought to consolidate and reanimate, by means of
the creation of a catechized laity organized under direct clerical control, a Latin
American Catholic identity free of the trappings of colonialism and compatible
with the sociopolitical challenges of modernity (Warren 1989, Pea 1995).
On the Bolivian altiplano, Monast and other Oblates from Canada were joined
by Catholic missionaries from the United States and Europe (Maryknoll and reg-
ular clergy) and Europe. Like Monast, missionaries I have interviewed consistently
recounted their frustration during these years at finding themselves to be func-
tionaries of sacraments. Newly arriving missionaries could do little more than
meet the pre-existing demand placed on them by Aymara for lifecycle rites and
fiesta masses. In the late 1960s and early 70s, it was not uncommon for priests
in rural parishes to celebrate more than 400 masses per year. Pastoral agents
with their own ideals and expectations of evangelization found their time and
energy completely consumed with celebrating and traveling to and from mass-
es in rural communities.
These and related challenges gave rise to a renewed reflection on the status
of indigenous Catholic identity and colonial missionary history. The issue, as
Monast (1972) framed it at the time is whether the Aymara are evangelized or
only baptized. The question encodes much of the emergent pastoral ideology
and its underlying presuppositions. Practically, these involved a focus upon
authentic evangelization and catechization as opposed to the celebration of
sacraments. The latter were seen by priests of the time as superficial or exter-
nal and prone to appropriation in ways that masked the endurance of tradi-
tional indigenous practices. Pastoral practices and writings of the time betray
an ambivalent assessment of colonial precedents in the region. On the one
hand, colonial Catholicism was seen as the cause of corrupt contemporary
Catholic practices; colonial evangelizers had been effective but misguided. At
722
ANDREW ORTA
the same time, colonial missionaries were condemned as ineffective; their con-
temporary successors focused upon completing their work: the as yet unat-
tained interior penetration of a superficial Christian identity. A generation
later, Father Jan echoed precisely these concerns. This ambiguous sense of the
corruptions of colonialism and the endurance of indigenous identity, of a con-
demnation of colonial Catholicism and a sense of modernity as an opportuni-
ty for its fulfillment, is familiar from other approaches to cultural conjuncture
in the Andes (see note 3). In the context of contemporary pastoral practice, it
suggests an evangelical war waged along two frontsthe missionizing self and
the missionized otherand smuggles into missionary experience a posited
discrete Andean Other accessible despite the accretions and distortions of a colo-
nial evangelization.
Many missionaries responded to this excessive sacramentalism by limiting the
number of fiesta masses they celebrated and by actively discouraging such ritu-
als in ways that often put them in the rhetorical company of their Protestant ri-
vals (cf. Buechler and Buechler 1978). They also sought to recruit and train native
catechists who would serve in their own communities and, it was hoped, provide
a more extensive, continuous and culturally effective pastoral presence. William,
a North American priest, active in Bolivia since the late 1960s, commented,
Missioners of the 50s and 60s came to the point where they said, We just
cant keep up these rounds of fiestas... [They just] have absolutely no re-
lationship to anything else. So they almost said to the villages, We wont
come anymore to do the fiestas unless you name a catechist who be-
comes your delegate responsible for the continuation of the Church com-
munity here.
The sense that periodic priestly visits merely punctuate with Catholic ritual an
otherwise non-Christian Aymara life offers a temporal analogue to other notions
of an incomplete evangelization. It reinforces the imagined missionary experi-
ence of an enduring Andean alter.
and I discovered this here, among the Aymar People

The subsequent history of Andean pastoral activity can be traced through a se-
quence of pastoral ideologies ranging from the modernizing and politically
conservative rubric of Catholic Action, through the politically radicalized and no
less modernizing aims of theologies of liberation, to more recent pastoral ide-
723
ologies, dubbed theologies of inculturation.14 Inculturation is premised on

the valorization of indigenous cultural practices, taking them as local expres-
sions of universal Christian meaning. In Jans words: We must learn the lan-
guage, recuperate Aymara cultural elements, [and] use them for a more
profound evangelization.
Though its culture friendly stance marks an apparently radical break from the
relatively rationalizing, text-based practices of theologies of liberation (Buechler
and Buechler 1978, Nelson 1986, Orta 1995), theologies of liberation and the-
ologies of inculturation are identical in their construction of local experiences as
the authentic ground of religious meaning. The dominant narrative explanation
in the missionary literature for the emergence of liberation theology out of
more conservative pastoral strategies has been one of reverse missionization
(e.g., Cox 1984) whereby missionaries undergo a conversion-precipitating expe-
rience of God in the poor, enabling them to do theology from below. The
more recent shift from liberation theology to inculturation has involved a shift
from the liberationists emphasis on Gods preferential option for the poor to
the authenticity of the cultural Other.15 In ways comparable to the rhetoric of lib-
eration theology, inculturationist missionaries find in local cultural practices a
clarified understanding of Christian meaning and Christian values.
First articulated in the 1970s,16 inculturation emerged as a response to what
theologians percieve as a double tension: on the one hand, the relationship of
the Church with modernity; on the other, the relations of the Church with tra-
ditional cultures (Marzal et al. 1991; Suess 1991). Much like liberation theolo-
gians, inculturationists take a highly historicized view of the bible. But where
liberationists classically have sought to identify parallels between biblical histo-
ry and contemporary experience, inculturationists are also concerned with the
bible as a record of a particular and particularly authentic amalgamation be-
tween Christianity and the local cultures of Antiquity. As the sites of the original
incarnation and the prototypical evangelization, these are benchmarks against
which all forms of local conversion are to be judged.17 By this criteria, Christianity
in Europe or North Americathat is the lived experiences of most of the foreign
missionaries on the altiplanoreflects on the one hand a relativized particularity
but on the other a cultural amalgamation judged to be more genuine that that
found in the Andes. Thus, the North American missionary, Father William, con-
trasted North American and European Catholicismcharacterized by deep
roots of faithwith the Church in Bolivia, where the roots of faith are not that
deep. Theyre all superficial. They were imposed and they were not allowed to
evolve and mature as happened in Europe.
724
ANDREW ORTA
In the views of inculturationist missionaries, as a consequence of shallow

roots of faith religious practice is rendered doubly opaque. We dont know yet
what people really understand by the customs that they do, noted William,
adding, They dont know. His concerns are echoed by other missionaries who
lament a space between real meaning and superficial practical intent, such that
neither (Aymara) actors nor (missionary) observers grasp the significance of lo-
cal cultural practices. This is, of course, yet another voicing of the classic dilem-
ma of syncretism; the spatial metaphor of deep roots corrects the heretofore
superficial evangelization. But there is an important sleight of hand here that we
should keep our eyes on. For the roots connecting deeper meanings with surface
practices, serve also, within the frame of inculturation, to align a universal
Christian core with a local cultural surface. These roots, in other words, are an
index of a translatability that is fundamental to inculturation.
In this way, deep roots of faith are the enabling condition of a kind of socio-
religious pluralism, allowing a (core) Catholic authenticity to assimilate to a va-
riety of (surface) cultural traditions. The possibility of multiplicity is predicated
upon the authenticity or depth of evangelization, aligning local particularity
with respect to a presupposed underlying truth. As Father William tells us, in-
culturationist evangelization involves making sure that they and we really un-
derstand what they are doing.
By the lights of inculturation, missionaries witness and discover Christian
truths in other cultures. Pastoral workers conceive of the Aymara as a people of
the bible, a people enmeshed in the unfolding narrative of their own new tes-
tament, and in so doing missionaries construct themselves as witnesses to and
aspiring participants in Aymara history. They posit and position themselves as
subjects of revelation. In your communal organization, you express and reveal
God, declared a (Brazilian) pastoral worker to a gathering of Aymara catechists.
She continued: You are the revealers: through your experiences you can reveal
God to other peoples. In this ways, inculturation is as much about the conver-
sion of the missionaries as it is about the evangelization of Aymara.
Let us return to Father Miguel.
Miguels conversion in the mid 1980s is correlated with the shift of pastoral
paradigms from liberation theology to inculturation, and can be read as the re-
organization of the missionary self in terms of an emerging pastoral ideology. But
these pastoral ideologies are never simply imposed from without. Certainly in a
setting like the Andes, with a long history of missionary engagement, pastoral
ideologies arise in interaction with situated practices and the local constraints
and presuppositions to which missionaries are subject. There is, then, an element
725
of truth, though a distorted one, in the missionary characterization of the ex-

perience of otherness as a motor of (reverse) conversion. Although Miguel seems
to be claiming a transparent recovery of religious meaning in his experience of
the Aymara, and a corresponding rejection of European Catholicism metonymi-
cally cast off with his watch, he is not going native in any simple way. Nor does
inculturation effect a straightforward recognition of religious plurality. For at
stake in inculturation is a discursive alignment of Aymaraness establishing not
a horizontal relationship of pluralism, but a hierarchical relationship of en-
compassment. Aymara religiosity is valorized always with respect to a posited
transcendent field of Christian meaning.18 At issue in Miguels conversion is not
an evacuation of his western/Christian self, not a separation from what had been
my other life, but rather a controlled and controlling alignment with otherness
through a reinstrumentalized western/Christian self. Inculturation gives force
to a particular framing of this evangelical encounter and the subsequent rein-
strumentalization of self.
After recounting his transformative experience in the mountains and his piv-
otal rejection of his watch, Miguel continued:
And I discovered my own roots. I come from the peasantry. A peasantry that
also had to struggle because it was close to and influenced by a mechanized
society, an industrial society, and all of these things that have to go with the
watch. [...] I discovered my own deep roots in that we also, in spite of all of
these things, as Polish campesinos and under minifundiaalso a corre-
spondence with themwe had to defend our identity before communist
power, and especially during Stalinist times [...] I discovered as well that I
lived the calendar not of hours and minutes, but I also lived the calendar of
seasons: seasons of harvesting, of sowing or reaping, of fallow, others that
govern our lives. And I discovered this here, among the Aymara people. I
threw away the watch, my life changed, my way of behaving with them, my
way of working. I no longer had any problem with impatience with running
around, I calmed down very much. The cultural horizon opened up much
more for me. I began to understandafter I made my own calculations
how foolish I had been. The Aymara dedicate more time to God and to the
Church even though they do not go to mass every Sunday like the best
Polish Catholic, who, during the course of the year only dedicates one hour
every Sunday for the mass. At best he is in a group [and] dedicates one
more hour on Saturday. Combining all of these hours, I saw that an Aymara
may not go every Sunday to mass, but in one season is capable [of spend-
726
ANDREW ORTA
ing] an entire week with his wife and with their children dedicated to a re-
treat, an encuentro, a convivencia, a prayer. And comparatively [the Aymara]
has dedicated many more hours than the other [i.e. the Polish Catholic].
Funtional Equivalence: Mutual Meanings

and Missionary Shifters
The irony of Miguels calculus of Christianityas he systematically measures
time in order to justify casting off his watchdiscloses precisely the complex in-
tertwining of pluralism and universality to which I have been gesturing. Central
to the processes of missionization and conversion is the production of mutual
intelligibility and translatability through the privileging of specific dimensions of
commensurability (e.g., Keane 1996; Stewart and Shaw 1994). In an insightful dis-
cussion of such functional equivalence, Keane (1996), for instance, examines
Protestant missionary strategies in Indonesia involving both the displacement of
indigenous religious practices and their replacement with or renewal through
Christian(ized) practices understood by the missionaries as fulfilling the same so-
cial functions without the taint of pagan fetishism.19
Where Keane focuses on missionary understandings of indigenous practices,
my aim here is to call attention to the ways in which the localized practices of
the missionaries themselves are subject to revalorization predicated upon a
mutual intelligibility. Such intelligibility is generated within and with respect to
a range of situational constraints, constraints that take on particular force in such
long term entangled settings as those encountered in the Andes. Within these set-
tings, Miguels conversion and comparable narratives of pastoral transformation
are a condition of the possibility for establishing meaningful frameworks of
conversion, aligning transcendent frames of meaning and action with the lo-
calized fields of missionary practice through the translocal biographies of mis-
sionary selves. A Christian truth, available to Miguel from his biographical past,
is discoveredhere, among the Aymara people.
Of note in Miguels narrative is a set of equivalences that do not involve is-
sues of doctrinal content or formal religious meaning. In Miguels words, his con-
version is not in the moral sense, or at the level of faith. Rather, the
achievement of his conversion is the calibration of the rhythm of Aymara ritu-
al practices with his own expectations and sensibilities. His frustration about
Aymara participating irregularly in Catholic ritual activities, about seasonal
shifts, and so forth are soothed not by insights into the spatiotemporal sensi-
bilities of the Aymara per se, but by insights that enable a transformed under-
727
standing of himself that anticipates and authorizes the practices he identifies

among the Aymara. The relationship of commensurability thus generated au-
thorizes Aymara patterns of ritual activity as plausibly Catholic, but also au-
thorizes his own missionary participation within the entangled local field as
continuous with an anchoring Christianity that transcends and embraces local
specificity. This double process of authorization negotiates (from a missionary
perspective) the positions of missionaries as component subjects of Andean lo-
cality, intelligible interactants within Aymara sociocultural fields. At the same
time, and correlated with the self-conscious transformation of missionaries,
such discourses also place in local (and translocal) circulation a particular fram-
ing of Aymara localityone that is often in tension with the practices and pre-
suppositions of Aymara interactants.20
These missionary conversions weave together biography, national histories,
and evangelical ideologies to constitute effective subject positions within the lo-
cal Andean mission field. They enable an authoritative missionary participation
in the production of locality. This is the second point I signaled in the intro-
duction. In place of discussions of Christian doctrine, or glosses of the meta-
physical content of Andean religion, these conversion narratives are notable
for a tendency to stress the day-to-day activitiesriding circuit, in particular
that compose the practical routines of missionary life. These are not only evan-
gelical analogues of the sorts of spatial practices that are often integral to the
production of locality21, they are in fact vital switch points between the pro-
duction of Andean locality in indigenous and missionary terms. In this sense,
these missionary discourses of self-transformation focused on the situated prac-
tical routines of missionary-Aymara entanglements are analogous to what so-
ciolinguists call shiftersindexical terms that are semantically underspecified
and take their meaning largely from the context of their use (Silverstein 1976).
The referential success of shifters is directly linked to the generation of situ-
ationally specific frames more or less shared by interacting speakers (e.g.,
Silverstein 1988). In a similar way, like such shifters, these discourses of mis-
sionary self-discovery in the Andes are functionally oriented to the establish-
ment of a meaning bearing interactional context.
The Everyday Forms of the Mission Life (2)

The first time I visited Father Hernando in the parish where he lives, my wife
Ingrid and I arrived by bus at dusk on a day dampened by a cold steady drizzle.
We stumbled off the bus at the plaza of the community and found ourselves, un-
728
ANDREW ORTA
expectedly, in the middle of a fiestabrass bands blaring, dancers laboring un-

der the weight of their soggy costumes, and a crowd of drunken spectators who
quickly turned their attention to us. We stared uncertainly at them; they blinked
and weaved amiably as we gathered our packs from the top of the bus.
Father Hernando, alerted by an intermediary that I was interested in con-
ducting research in his parish, had called me a few weeks earlier in La Paz to
suggest that I visit to discuss my intentions. This was a fortunate opportunity
and a generous invitation. Hernando was almost continuously on the move,
serving two parishes under his care and participating in a series of other meet-
ings, workshops and courses that took him to other parts of Bolivia, and oc-
casionally out of the country. In his phone call, Hernando brusquely told me
when he would be at home and, in a sink-or-swim style of assistance I slowly
learned to appreciate, pointed me towards a section of town near the munic-
ipal cemetery of La Paza warren of semi-paved streets and dozens of store-
front bus-companies running creaking buses to rural communities around the
Department of La Paz. If I asked around, he told me, I could find the compa-
ny running buses a few times a week that passed by the roadside community
where he lived.
Declining invitations to drink and dance, Ingrid and I got directions to the
parish house and set off with a dwindling escort of stumbling revelers intent on
showing us the way. Hernando greeted us with a mixture of surprise and amuse-
ment and invited us to join the rest of the pastoral team in dinner. Over the
course of my research I spent a number of such evenings with pastoral teams in
a number of parisheseating, playing cards, talking, laughing. These are typi-
cally close knit, transnational communities of priests, nuns, lay professionals
doctors, agronomists, etc.and other workers affiliated with the parish.
My sense of that first dinner, reinforced by a handful of comparable expe-
riences in other parishes, was of a pastoral community huddled inside while the
tumult of the fiestanon-stop brass band music, crowd noises and fights, the
distinctive singing of drunken men and women, the occasional detonation of
dynamiteroiled just outside their door. Yet this was not a matter of mission-
aries cut-off from the people amongst whom they lived. The conversation
around the kitchen table skipped from commentary on the fiesta sponsors,
speculation as to who would inherit the sponsorship for the following year, re-
ports of how many sheep and llamas had been slaughtered to feed the dancers,
reports of which notable migrants had returned from La Paz or elsewhere for
the festivalall reflecting a degree of situated insight into the event. As pastoral
team members arrived from meetings or errands, or from strolls to observe the
729
action (or from requests to attend to the wounded), all brought updates and gos-
sip. Hernando himself had celebrated a mass earlier that day, though he has-
tened to add that it was a mere coincidence that he was in town for the
fiestaas I took the implication, he was no mere functionary of sacraments.
The next day he celebrated Sunday mass in the community, assisted promi-
nently by a recently ordained indigenous minister of the Eucharist to whom
Hernando was trying to transfer most of the sacramental responsibility for the
community. The festival sponsors also attended that celebration, which culmi-
nated in a procession led by the sponsors carrying the image of the saint
around the plaza.
The mix of amusement, engagement, and disapproval in these interior vig-
ils evokes well the ambiguity of fiestas in recent Catholic pastoral thought.
Huddled around their tables, pastoral agents enact less their separation or alien-
ation from the Aymara than the complex framing of Aymaraness entailed by in-
culturationist discourse. The Aymaraness missionaries seek to reinforce is but
fleetingly available to them in what they experience as a complex pastoral ge-
ography of concealment, degradation and authenticity. Their conversions gen-
erate effective meaningful subject positions out of the constraints and
contingencies of their translocal experience.
Living the Past Another Way

During the course of his more than three decades of missionary service in
Bolivia, Father Hernando has periodically sent out letter-diaries to friends and
family in his native Spain and colleagues from his religious Order around the
world. In a letter written in the mid-1980s, Father Hernando reflects on the con-
trasts between his prior life as a city person and his present rural pastoral ex-
perience. Writing during a period of severe flooding, he suggested that city life
had sheltered him from the harsh realties of nature, which he was now forced
to confront, and he compared his missionary experiences of riding circuit to vis-
it Aymara communities with his years in Spain, during which he enjoyed hiking
and camping trips,
It is not the same to go 15 days on a trip, sleeping every day on the ground
or wherever, carrying all of the essentials and this for adventure or even
with a fixed goal, as it is to go those same days to share the life of people
who always sleep almost on the ground and always have only the essen-
tials in the true sense of the word.
730
ANDREW ORTA
It is not the same to experience thirst, fatigue, hunger, tiredness, heat,

cold during some prepared days of vacation, as it is to have to pass the
same [period] together with a pueblo that you see to be obliged to pass
through all of these things always.
From this perspective, you dont stop living the past, but you do cer-
tainly live it in another way; there are real faces, whose presence trans-
forms all of your life.
Thus, with time one goes discovering that in the struggle for life, the im-
portant things are truly important and the rest is secondary. And not the
reverse as it usually appears to us in the other environments of the city.
That is today, when one knows that upon whether it rains or not depends
whether there will be a harvest and thus whether the people will have food
to eat, rain stops being only an atmospheric phenomenon and becomes
a sign of life or death, it becomes something important.
The missionary encounter provokes a revelatory reassessment of the mis-

sionarys past: things that previously appeared to us as reverse[d], are set
right. This reciprocal evangelizationthe Aymara make us human, suggested
one pastoral worker; they evangelize useffects an alignment of the biogra-
phical past and the pastoral present: ...you dont stop living the past, but you
do certainly live it in another way...
These accounts also participate in a missionary construction of Andean pas-
toral geography, which, under the frame of inculturation, posits outlying Aymara
hamlets as sites of indigenous (Christian) authenticity in contrast with central
towns and cities. Missionaries are often deeply critical of Aymara migrants to
these places, many of whom return to their natal communities for annual fies-
tas. During my first visit with him, Hernando referred wryly to the fiesta of the
eternal return, and, like other pastoral workers I interviewed, he found in such
reverse migration a source of the corruption of traditional Aymara religiosity.
Such positions shift attention away from the undeniably hybrid colonial nature
of fiestas (e.g., Abercrombie 1998) to underscore a new threat from without. They
also serve to finesse the revised moral status of fiestas under the frame of in-
culturation (as positive rituals that generate community) and the predicated re-
coverable locality (vis--vis corrupting central towns and cities) upon which
inculturationist thought rests. The paradoxical intimate familiarity with the fiesta
enacted around the (enclosed) parish house table stakes a claim of access to this
local authenticity. But this space between corruption and authenticity is also trav-
eled by the missionaries, who are themselves migrants, and who tend to have
731
comfortable parish houses in central towns and nicely appointed quarters in

houses maintained by their Orders in the city (of La Paz). The transformed mis-
sionary is thus better able to transit this pastoral space, and in so doing to per-
form the commensurability between his translocal Christian biography and the
localized religious meaning he has encountered on the altiplano.
As with Miguels conversion22, Hernandos letter was written in the wake of a
set of crises that both challenged his ability to continue his pastoral work and em-
bedded him in the production of Aymara locality in dramatic ways. Hernando
directly experienced a series of repressive actions by the Vatican and the Bolivian
government directed against progressive clergy in the 1970s. Poor relations with
the Church hierarchy forced him to keep a low profile or risk losing his parish.
A coup in 1980, initiated the brief, brutal reign of General Lus Garcia Meza.
Hernando was denounced by a local official, and forced to flee his parish to the
relative security of his Orders house in La Paz. He returned after a few months,
although his name remained on the list of those to be detained.
He cites this experience as establishing a basis of trust and solidarity in his re-
lations with Aymara of his parish. He noted that after his return from La Paz, he
was allowed to remain at a meeting of local Aymara leaders planning a protest
blockade23. The shared historical event is transformative; Hernando told me he
felt he was becoming less of a stranger, he was no longer as foreign as he had
been. Hernandos recollection of deepening ties to the Aymara was underscored
in his narrative when he told me that while in La Paz, he consulted a yatiri (an
indigenous ritual specialist, classically the idolatrous rival of the Catholic priest)
a native of his parish, who had a house in the cityto divine when he would be
able to return to his parish.
This experience was followed by yet another period of crisis: a severe drought
that hit the area in 1983. The parish coordinated a range of relief efforts that
built upon Hernandos existing base of trust and involved him in a new set of ac-
tivities bringing him into contact with a wide range of Aymara. He felt that af-
terwards, he could go to any corner of [the parish] and everyone would know
me. His success in working with local community authorities made him feel that
all of my years of work had served a purpose. He felt he was able to adapt ex-
ternal criteria of aid distribution (aid to the neediest) to what he saw as Aymara
values (all should receive equally), and allowed a number of decisions to be
made by local leaders. As a result, Hernando enjoyed increased acceptance by
his parishioners, as he was able to demonstrate that he was there for all of
them. This demonstration had a theological content for Hernando, who told me
I think the important thing I achieved is not something of formal religion, but
732
ANDREW ORTA
rather that at least in a determined moment they could have experienced that
God is near, that God did not fail them.
Hernando underscored for me his increasing proximity to the Aymara of his
parish with two examples. The first evokes issues of trust and deception. He not-
ed that although he gave local leaders a great amount of autonomy in financial
dealings related to relief supplies, and despite the advice and warnings of rep-
resentatives of relief agencies that the Aymara ought not be trusted in such mat-
ters, he is convinced that only a small percentage of the Aymara took advantage
of him. The second example, echoing Miguels comment that The cultural hori-
zon opened up much more for me, is his assertion that on the basis of this cri-
sis-driven solidarity he was able to begin a process of learning more about Aymara
culture. If until then, he told me, the people had never told me what they
thought, but rather said what is it that Padre Hernando wants to hear? Thats
what well tell him, then from that moment on it became possibleand you have
to be careful hereto be able to understand something more of them. But with-
out forcing it. I asked him if he were referring to Aymara culture. At the level of
culture, at the level of their customs, at the level of a number of things. And gen-
tly, it is not a question of asking, lets say, but rather it is that in a given situation,
a theme will come up, and although I am there, they will not stop talking [i.e.
whereas previously his presence would cause them to remain quiet].
Hernando felt he and his pastoral team were treated less like a special guest,
less like outsiders by the Aymara. The growing proximity to Aymara culture is al-
so indexed spatially in pastoral practice. Rather than visit communities for brief
visits, returning to his parish house in the evening, he made efforts to remain in
the communities, sleeping on the floor of a local school, or sometimes being
hosted by a catechist.
Missionary Measures and the Measure of Missionaries

These comments open onto the final point I want to make, that a corollary of the
achievement of a localized subject position is a reciprocal self-consciousness, as
missionaries imagine themselves within the local field as the Aymara see them.
Hernandos sense that the Aymara are engaged in a project of dissemblance,
calculating what is it that Padre Hernando wants to hear? thats what well tell
him (to which he once told me he countered by trying never to let the Aymara
know what he was thinking, so that they would be more likely to be sincere with
him) is one expression of this and underscores a sense of opacity that is poten-
tially overcome through the subjecthoods emergent from missionary conver-
733
sions. Yet despite missionaries concerns about Aymara opacity, many Aymara I
spoke with attributed to priests an alarming capacity to monitor their activities
and detect their dissemblance. This sense of surveillance clearly relates an ex-
perience of priestly power. (It also unsettles any claims to an insular indigenous
locality, and positions all local practices within and with respect to a presupposed
complex local social field.) Nonetheless, this sort of reciprocal self-consciousness
is grounded in a predicated commensurability that is never unproblematically
there but that is produced and sustained through a host of situated activities.
Like missionary shifters, these discourses of conversion and the situated
practices that precipitate and perform them produce the here-and-now contexts
of missionary-Aymara interaction as ones suffused with evangelical potential. The
self-contextualizing character of missionary conversion involves the missionary
positing and positioning himself as a plausible evangelical subject within the mis-
sion field. This plausible subjectivity turns in part on the possibility of intersub-
jectivity. It is this intersubjectivity, I think, that is asserted in the reciprocal
self-consciousness of missionaries.
As a final example let me return indirectly to the case of Miguel, through ex-
periences recounted to me by other members of his Order. In the early 1980s
they expanded their missionary activity among the Aymara, inheriting an alti-
plano parish from another pastoral team.24 During their first years in the parish,
the priests built a new parish house. They recounted this to me as a significant
step in their process of being accepted within the parish. The construction of
the house was a self-conscious performance on the part of the missionaries of
their capacity to work. For some, this sense of themselves as laborers was tied to
their sense of their Polish identity. They presented it to me as an important di-
mension of identification with the Aymara. I would agree: workphysical toil,
and especially house constructionis an ethnically salient activity for Aymara.25
Of particular note here is the keen sense on the part of these missionaries that
they were being watched by the Aymara. They recorded the house construction
with photographs and showed the photos to me as they told me that the Aymara
were greatly impressed by the sight. Their impression was confirmed inde-
pendently by Aymara informants who remarked favorably on the industriousness
of the missionaries they had been watching.
Conclusions
Missionary conversion and the practices that precipitate and perform them are
self-contextualizing. It is not coincidental that they involve biographical memo-
734
ANDREW ORTA
ry, which, like all acts of memory, functions indexically (e.g., Halbwachs 1980).
But these invocations of biography do more than declare where the missionar-
ies are coming from. They trade on, indeed they discursively produce, a partic-
ular alignment between the local (missionary) field and distant missionary
experiences in ways authorized by dominant pastoral ideologies. More than
that, they authorize and reference specific pastoral practices that are integral to
the production of locality. This essay has examined missionary conversion ac-
counts and correlated pastoral practices as part of the pragmatic work of posi-
tioning missionaries as plausible subjects within a locality and negotiating the
production of that locality in terms deriving from translocal missionary ideolo-
gies and the constraints of an ongoing situation of entanglement. The achieve-
ment of such missionary shifters is a form of reciprocal self-consciousness or
presupposable intersubjectivity across the various identity categories coimpli-
cated in Andean locality. This is a condition of the possibility for missionization.
It is also an indication of the ways such composite, entangled settings are real-
ized and experienced as more or less coherent lived worlds.
In this regard the Andean case appears to be privileged in a number of ways.
For instance, the long history of entanglement between evangelizers and
Andeans has created a situation in which Catholic and Hispanic cultural ele-
ments are integral components of local indigenous practice (e.g., Salomon 1981,
Abercrombie 1998). Yet it should be noted that research in areas of Melanesia
with a much shallower history of missionary contact report a similar situation:
that Christianity is often claimed as an indispensable (and sometimes au-
tochthonous) element of local tradition (e.g., White 1991, Errington and Gewertz
1995). Similarly, a key task for recent generations of Andeanistsand an ongo-
ing one, in my viewhas been to wrestle with what I have described as an an-
alytic heritage premised on tracing continuities in indigenous culture and filtering
out (or marginalizing as superficial overlays) colonial and more recent influ-
ences (see notes 3 and 6). Here I may be faulted for extending a regionalists an-
alytic sensitivities to situations farther afield, though (like a missionary) I believe
my message speaks meaningfully to other regional contexts.
Though I focus here primarily on foreign missionaries, my aim is not to
thresh them from their local context.26 Rather I mean to evoke the ways in
which foreign missionaries experience and enact their positions as presupposable
and necessary components of Andean locality. Such discussions problematize any
heuristically straightforward sense of sides in such entangled settings. None of
this is to deny the power asymmetries and often-violent histories that are the
backdrop to such settings, or to downplay the often clearly marked and va-
735
lenced categories of difference through which missionaries and Aymara experi-

ence them. (Indeed, part of my discussion involves a wary critical reading of a
pastoral ideology that seems relatively benign.) But as we develop an increasingly
nuanced understanding of a range of local strategies for realizing globally en-
tangled contexts as coherent lived worlds, we are also called to account for a
range of strangers who are component subjects of local-level ethnographic
fields. More than vectors of abstract colonialism or globalization, their translo-
cal trajectories are transformative in ways they never entirely control. This dis-
cussion is part of an effort to understand more fully the unfolding local histories
of such power relations, and the valenced local fields they give rise to, through
the situated examination of missionaries.
NOTES
Acknowledgements: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association and at the Sociocultural Anthropology Workshop of the
Department of Anthropology of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where various
participants provided feedback that has helped me to improve the work. My thanks, especially,
to Matti Bunzl, Alma Gottlieb, Bill Kelleher, Alejandro Lugo, and Stuart Rockefeller, along
with the three reviewers for Anthropological Quarterly. I owe a more fundamental debt to the
many people in BoliviaAymara and foreign pastoral workerswho have tolerated my in-
trusions into their lives and generously taught me so much.
1The research spans fieldwork from 1990-1992 with briefer follow-up research in 1997,
1999 and 2000. This essay, focused principally on foreign Catholic missionaries, draws up-
on field observations and interviews of missionaries in various rural parishes in the Diocese
of La Paz and the Diocese of Oruro.
2This important stream of scholarship on missionaries also reflects a limiting factor in the an-
thropology of missionaries, as the focus of most work to date has been heavily historical
bent on a dissection of a colonial situation. As others have noted (see Stoler and Cooper 1997
and Comaroff and Comaroff 1997), this very productive reexamination of colonialism risks
reifying it as a stable legacy forged in a historically distant conjuncture, rather than as an un-
folding condition of entanglement. Similar concerns have been raised about the legacy of
the colonial encounter in the Andes (e.g., Mills 1997, Orta 1999).
3See,for instance, the seminal work of Kubler (1946), as well as the work of the missionary-
ethnography Monast, whom I will treat in more detail below. For other commentaries on
what I have elsewhere labeled disjunctive approaches to the Andes, see Mills 1997,
Abercrombie 1998, Orta 1996, 1999.
4Pratts influential phrase derives from her innovative effort to treat the relations among col-
onizers and colonized .not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copres-
ence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically
asymmetrical relations of power (1992:7). This glosses my goals quite well. Yet the metaphor
of a contact zonePratts neologism is modeled after the linguistic phenomena of contact
or pidgin languages, suggesting a muddled middle of appropriation and imposition with dis-
tinct interacting linguistic structures on either endevokes a space of transculturation, of
the bi-directional if asymmetrical processes of appropriation and reception, that is analyti-
cally premised on the local-level replication of the space between metropole and colony.
While such a space is acute and quite salient in the case of the travel writing and compara-
736
ANDREW ORTA
ble textual practices Pratt examines, approaching such settings ethnographically poses chal-
lenges to this and corollary models of frontiers and borders.
5With the concept of entanglement I am borrowing from the usage of the term in quan-
tum physics, where it marks the limits of possibility for the analysis or description of discrete,
individual components of more complex phenomena (Zajonc 1993; Schrdinger 1956). This
seems to me a productive extension of the term, which has been used to by other anthro-
pologists to evoke the complex multilaterally constructed nature of colonial and postcolo-
nial contexts as well as the translocal complexity that often marked precolonial situations
(e.g., Errington and Gewertz 1995; Thomas 1991). To my ear, the term also signals the un-
seen dangers and asymmetries of intention and power that give shape to such settings.
6In contrast to classical discussions of Andean locality, I am referring to a profoundly translo-
cal and porous space in which missionaries (along with other strangers) are to be understood
as presupposable, component, co-participants. In part this has to do with the phenomenon
of missionization as a vector of locally sited translocal agents. In part this has to do with what
I take to be commonly encountered sensibilities in the Andes concerning community and
personhood as generated out of ceaseless translocal activity (e.g., Orta 1998; 2000). In
Andean studies, the rubric of missionization has tended to call to mind founding moments
of encounter, too often taken as a determining template for later cultural formations, rather
than ongoing processes of entanglement. Happily, this characterization of the literature is
rapidly becoming a caricature as recent scholarship in the Andes; has drawn attention on the
one hand to the ways the early colonial encounter has been a misused model for talking
about more complex middle, late and postcolonial social fields (Mills 1997), and on the oth-
er to the ways colonial and indigenous actors in the Andes emerge as frontier practitioners,
adepts of a more or less shared cultural pidgin (Abercrombie 1998). The work of William
Taylor (1996) on the localized routinization of colonial missionary practices in Mesoamerica
points us beyond the frontier metaphor to the capillary practices of local life.
7Before
departing for Peas, Jan had celebrated mass in Batallas before a small congregation
composed chiefly of members of a Catholic youth group organized by a sister in Martas charge.
8Many of these transactions were mediated by catechists, who accompanied solicitants to the
desk where Jan and Marta were working and who often served as translators from Aymara
to Spanish.
9Though it may not be the only thing they want to hear, I suspect that Marta is correct about
the importance of hearing the name of the deceased spoken by a priest. Such funeral
Masses are part of a sequence of mortuary rites conceptualized as offerings from the living
to the dead. The specificity of the alignment produced between living mourners and the de-
ceased is central. For instance, among the responsibilities of those presiding over household
level altars to which other community members may come to pray (sometimes reciting
versions of Latin prayers) during All Souls Day, is instructing the pray-ers in the name of the
deceased and the names of other more distantly departed souls to be remembered by
name. With time, the particularity of a given souls name is effaced and the long dead
merge into a category of laqa achachilas (dust grandparents) (e.g., Orta in press).
10We should be equally attendant to the complex positions of missionaries who are, as
strangers in a strange land, subject to control as foreign aliens in Bolivia, and subordinates
within various hierarchies of the Catholic Church. Here, let me recall my next jeep trip with
Jan, a month later, when we embarked to an inter-parish event in Copacabana. The bishop
Jans bosswas to be in attendance and Jan was quite nervous. While my wife Ingrid and I
and two of the nuns waited for him in the Landrover, he completed a last minute shower (it-
self an index of relative missionary affluence) so as to arrive fresh and clean for his encounter
with the Bishop. The nuns, clearly amused by this anxious and recently arrived priest, teas-
ingly called him Don Tranquilo (roughly Mister Mellow).
737
11Womens/Mothers Clubs are an ubiquitous presence in Latin America, and reflect the as-
cendance in the 1970s of a development strategy instrumentally keyed on women as a point
of access to all family members, and reflecting related goals of better integrating women
within development planning and community leadership and decision-making.
12Irefer to a series of pastoral project initiated since the 1950s, when the Catholic Church be-
gan an institutional reengagement with Latin America. This was animated in part by Pope
Pius XIIs call for an evangelical effort to counter the spread of what he saw as the twin evils
of Communism and Protestantism in the region, and reflected a broaderer institutional
concern to remain relevant and engaged in the post-War world.
13As Arturo Escobar (1995:31) has noted, the notions of underdevelopment and Third
World were the discursive products of the post-World War II climate. These concepts did not
exist before 1945. They emerged as working principles within the process by which the
Westand, in different ways, the Eastredefined itself and the rest of the world.
14For a more detailed discussion of inculturation and this post-War pastoral history, see
Orta 1995, 1998.
15The nature of this segue is complex: comprising issues of cultural dissonance between the
highly rationalized text-based practices of liberation theology in indigenous areas, the im-
pact of sanctions by the Vatican and the repression of the progressive Church by national se-
curity states, changing cohorts of missionaries, as well as globally identifiable shifts from
class-based politics of identity to those premised upon ethnicity.
16Seuss (1991) and Damen (1989) present theological overviews of inculturation and its emer-
gence (see also, Irarrazaval 1988). Jord remains the seminal work for discussions of Andean
theology on the southern altiplano (see also Llanque Chana 1990, Quispe et al. 1987).
17Suess 1991 for instance cites Hellenic culture as at once the template and limiting condi-
tion of evangelization. This Hellenic culture, as it was the first matrix for the expression of
the Faith, limited and determined many times the reexpression of the Faith in other cultures
(185). Elsewhere, he writes: the inculturation in the Hellenic and western world demon-
strates the necessity and the possibility of inculturation; it also demonstrates, nevertheless,
the limits and the dangers of any singular effort of inculturation (213).
18Here, I am following other discussions of comparable relationships implicit in discourses
of multiculturalism, syncretism, and tolerance (e.g., van der Veer 1994; Asad 1993).
19For instance, sacrificial feasts effecting offerings to the ancestors are redeemed by mis-
sionaries who reframe them in ways that sever the pagan functions of the act (as an act of
exchange with the ancestors) from what missionaries conceive as the partible and valuable
socio-material function of the act (an act of commensality, a harvest feast of thanksgiving).
In Keanes case (Dutch Protestant missionization in colonial Sumba, Indonesia), the logic of
functional equivalence is shaped by a complex of factors ranging from a Calvinist utilitari-
an economism to what appears to be a form of imperial nostalgia (cf. Rosaldo 1989) on the
part of the missionaries, who reflect a sensitivity to the challenges posed to local social in-
tegrity by the entailments of conversion. (The theology of inculturation, of course, gives the
screw additional twists: inculturationists seek to revive once displaced or denounced in-
digenous religious practices, redeemed through a reading stressing their functional equiv-
alence with Christian socioreligious values.)
20I treat these tensions most directly in Orta 1998 (see also 2002)
21The presence of priests is vital for a host of local ritual practices ranging from fiestas, to bap-
tisms, to commemorating the dead, all of which are productive of the persons and practices that
renew local communities. In recent decades, neo-liberal economic and political forms have
opened up new spaces of practice for missionaries, as the Church (and other NGOs) have been
involved more extensively and more intensively in a variety of development and aid projects.
738
ANDREW ORTA
22Also like Miguels conversion, the timing of Hernandos letter correlates roughly with the
emergence of inculturation as the dominant paradigm of altiplano pastoral work

23Such blockades, which usually involve piling stones or digging ruts across a road to make
it impassible, and harassing, sometimes violently, any traffic attempting to pass is a long-
standing rural tactic of protest in Bolivia. In recent years coordinated blockades among
various opposition factions from lowland coca-growers to highlands rural communities
have precipitated siege-like conditions in Bolivias principal cities and provoked deadly re-
sponse by the government..
24It was Miguels adjustment to the new parish, I suspect, that was the proximate cause of
his crisis, compounded by the broader sea change in missionary ideology discussed above.
25Aymara I spoke with often asserted their capacities for hard physical work as something that
distinguished them from non-Indians. This was presented by many as a visceral quality
linked to the consumption of ethnically-marked foods such as potatoes or quinoa. Some con-
sultants blamed recent shifts in dietas more Aymara consumed purchased rice or noo-
dlesfor what they saw as the weakness of contemporary Aymara as compared with their
elders and ancestors. My own participation in house building and community work projects
such as irrigation maintenance was favorably remarked upon by my hosts, who I once over-
heard boasting to members of a neighboring community: Our gringo knows how to work!
26Nor do I mean to hold the Aymara constant or render them as monolithically as that pat
designation may imply. Limits of space and my immediate focus on missionaries across a
range of rural parishes constrain the nuanced situated evocation of local Aymara contexts
that has been my aim in other publications.
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LIVING THE PAST ANOTHER

I underwent a personal transformation, a conversion, not in the moral sense

In the course of a larger ethnographic project examining Catholic missionaries,

vice: personal parables from one fieldworker to another. As I came increasingly

fer to anthropologists wrestling to reconceptualize the sites and scales of

There is another form of agreement across much of this scholarship. Scholars

field situations and complex convergences of personal biographies and the

Missionaries and the local

things. Moreover, and as generations of pastoral workers have discovered to

The Everyday Forms of the Mission Life (1)

The Constraints of Conjuncture: Missionary Rebirth

We see that he finds himself in a state of wonder. He feels limited or dis-

ready understood as old news, an encounter already framed by a history of

Though he arrived presupposing a recognizable, commensurable Catholic

New alters for old altars?

and I discovered this here, among the Aymar People

ologies, dubbed theologies of inculturation.14 Inculturation is premised on

In the views of inculturationist missionaries, as a consequence of shallow

of truth, though a distorted one, in the missionary characterization of the ex-

Funtional Equivalence: Mutual Meanings

standing of himself that anticipates and authorizes the practices he identifies

The Everyday Forms of the Mission Life (2)

expectedly, in the middle of a fiestabrass bands blaring, dancers laboring un-

Living the Past Another Way

It is not the same to experience thirst, fatigue, hunger, tiredness, heat,

The missionary encounter provokes a revelatory reassessment of the mis-

comfortable parish houses in central towns and nicely appointed quarters in

Missionary Measures and the Measure of Missionaries

lenced categories of difference through which missionaries and Aymara experi-

emergence of inculturation as the dominant paradigm of altiplano pastoral work

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