"Living the Past Another Way:": Reinstrumentalized Missionary Selves in Aymara Mission Fields

This article examines Catholic missionaries in the Bolivian highlands. I focus on missionary conversion accounts—narratives of self-transformation in the face of their local mission fields—taking these as an analytic opportunity to address the positions of such global agents as component subjects of Aymara locality. Negotiating preexisting expectations of Catholicism and its representatives as necessary for the reproduction of local Aymara social life as well as emerging pastoral ideologies with their own expectations of indigenous locality, the self-transformation experienced by missionaries in the field asserts a reinstrumentalized missionary self as a plausible translocal subject.