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f o u r Good Housekeeping Negotiating Religion and Development at Home Negotiations, as human activity, happen in places.Where one can slow down enough to glimpse and perhaps go through the thin barriers between public and private life,one can begin to discern the points of contact and exchange where larger discourses meet and are transformed by local lives. Doors often represent this barrier between the public and the private , marking the liminal zone between the inside world of the household and the outside world of commerce, government, and public exchange .The space immediately around doors is of neither one world nor the other. In San Marcos, most people keep wooden benches or stools near the entrances to their houses as ready places to sit when guests appear or when occupants of the household want to make themselves available for conversation with passersby. During my time in town, I could always count on a dialogue with Don Segundo, my seventy-yearold neighbor who spent hours every day on a bench in front of his house near the main market square.“Where to today?” he would ask as I made my way up the hill toward the center of town.“Stop by on your way back for a copita [of cane alcohol]!” I often took Segundo up on his offer, pulling up one of his tree trunk stools and leaning against the outside wall of his house as we discussed local politics, weather, and his career as a horse breeder. As we talked, his wife, Sara, would frequently appear from the kitchen on the 103 other side of the wall, bringing us a steaming bowl of hominy (mote) or some tortillas that she had made. We became good friends, but neither I nor Brian, who also made it a habit to stop by for an occasional drink or round of cards, was ever invited inside to the spaces reserved for family.We remained outside,in public territory.The door was a barrier most people would never cross. Segundo’s and Sara’s door is not unusual. Double sided, doors in San Marcos often bear the marks of their occupants on their interiors as they support calendars, religious images, carved family names, or newspaper cuttings. On the outside, doors display the signs of more public interaction. Campaign posters decorated many domestic entrances in San Marcos in 2002, making it clear which political party the family behind them supported. Doors were also the markers of official government recognition and hegemony as mandatory census stickers from 2001 were joined by Ministry of Public Health vaccination stickers the following year.1 In each of these instances, doorways worked to identify the household as a basic social unit at the center of attention from public powers and institutions. Campaign workers, census takers, and health officials all announced their contact with household members inside the doors with signs placed prominently on the other side, purposefully within public view. This chapter is concerned with such interactions, and specifically with the household as a place where the larger networks that religion and development use and create come into contact. In the household, development organizations work in kitchens and bedrooms as they aim to modernize the ways people cook, eat, dispose of waste, sleep, and reproduce (or not).At the same time, many of these spaces are the object of religious discourses as evangelical Christian, Catholic, and older Andean sensibilities inform correct diet, family relationships, and ways of living in the house and on the land. Households in rural Ecuador are thus places where Ecuadorians encounter and negotiate many of the diverse and overlapping discourses that religion and development create. Sometimes Ecuadorians blend religious and development ideals into cohesive interpretive platforms that meld religious and scientific understandings of sexuality, households, and families. Sometimes, however, they explode those hybrids back into their previous, delineated forms. 104 Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories These processes of fusion and explosion point to a larger interaction between religion and development which calls into question development ’s exclusive claim to modernity, and also religion’s supremacy as the fount of tradition in domestic spaces. They also raise questions of agency and the contradictory place of desire as that which drives and is simultaneously stifled by religious and development discourses in the space of the home. Households, in other words, are places where discourses collide, fusing into new realities that combine elements of “tradition” and “modernity,” the sacred and the secular, or exploding...

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