Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories: Religion and Community Development in Rural Ecuador by Jill DeTemple (review)

Eschatology, the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind, clearly belongs to the Western realm of “religion.” In this well-written book, Jill DeTemple demonstrates how, historically and in terms of her ethnography of a community in Central Andean Ecuador, it also applies to Western notions of development. The author’s interest in the region began as a Peace Corps volunteer in the community of “San Marcos” (not its real name) in the province of Bolívar, and then continued as she carried out ethnographic field research there for a Ph.D. in Religious Studies.

Extended participant-observer ethnography in a small community, combined with advanced comparative studies in rural development and religion, gives the author a deep perspective on both subjects and leads to some significant insights. She introduces the readers to the subject through her own experience. In a secular development context in which the subject was the use of earthworms in a composting project, she was asked by a Catholic resident, “So, are you an evangelical, or what?” (p. 1). By page 23, after setting the scene for research in San Marcos, DeTemple has sketched for us what she calls a “global eschatology” embedded in a Western “eschatology of progress.”

These concepts are attached to a theology concerned with the fusing of religion and material gain that began with the European conquest of the Americas, continued through colonial expansion, and became embedded in schemes within the United States wherein “civilized” Western nations were compelled to “develop” non-Western (read “primitive” or “backward”) societies. In other words, the “salvation” of lesser nations became part and parcel of what might have been instead a locally based secular project of improving people’s life through developing technologies.

In addition to serious ethnography of a community located between the high Andes and the coast, the author gives us an excellent review of some important developments: the work of the Peace Corps in Ecuador, the evangelical movement based at the HCJB radio station, the medical-care delivery systems in Andean Quito, and Amazonian Shell. As the book’s narrative moves on we learn that it is in the household and community that the synthesis sketched above takes place, and it is also in these entities that the synthesis may “explode.” DeTemple then breaks down the significant contexts into field, kitchen, bedroom, and body, moving again between micro-level ethnography and macro-level Western history.

One way to condense what at times is a very complex argument is to offer a contingent analogy: “development” is to “modernity” as “religion” is to “tradition.” By locating the analogy in the decision making that took place within “households,” the author leads us to understand that propositions that conjoin or divide developmental modernity come about in local-level discourse. Here DeTemple introduces the concept of “hybridity,” which she uses extensively to refer to the fusions that uphold the analogy and what she calls the “explosions” whereby it is rent asunder. She often seems to be writing about what Marshall Sahlins calls a “structure of conjuncture” where local-level cosmology fuses with global political economic processes. Such language, to me, would describe these phenomena more clearly than does her near-obsessive reliance on “hybridity.”

The author is impressive in her use of relevant historical literature from the Ecuadorian Andes and from the global scene, but she eschews the adjacent Amazonian region of Ecuador almost entirely. This, unfortunately, leads her to identify the Huaorani as “Huarani,” which means “enemies like us,” rather than “us.” She also implies (pp. 44, 127) that General Rodrígez Lara gave his speech about “becoming white” in the Andes, citing the late Ronald Stutzman. Stutzman took his information from two of this reviewer’s publications, which he cited, that clearly show that president...