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s i x Spiritual Cardiology Wholeness, Becoming, and (Dis)Integration “Do gringos believe in bad air [mal aire]?”Lucía asked me one evening as I stood in her living room. I had come over to borrow her phone in order to check on a friend who was ill. She posed the question in a casual ,conversational tone,but she had stopped folding the pile of clothes in front of her. Her still hands were an indication that she was waiting with attention for my reply. Thinking it over, I answered that I was open to the idea of mal aire, a general name for a host of illnesses that Ecuadorians associate with ghosts and other spirits, especially as scientific medicine had failed me on more than one occasion. Nodding in agreement, Lucía resumed her work as she remarked that she had once had a terrible case. For weeks after having inadvertently walked past a graveyard, she recalled, she had suffered odd swelling in her joints and extremities, a condition that local clinic doctors attributed to high blood pressure. Though she sought relief both at the hospital in San Marcos and at a larger clinic in San Miguel, the highprotein and low-salt diet the doctors recommended did no good, and her problem worsened. She began to see red and to bleed from her eyes. It was only when she visited a local healer (curandera) that she found some relief. The healer quizzed Lucía about her activities, eventually naming the graveyard as the likely cause of her problems. She then mixed a 169 gallon of sugarcane alcohol with strong herbs from the mountains and told Lucía to consume it, as much as she could at a time, until it was gone. Though it made her sweat profusely, Lucía said the mixture cured her of the ailment inside of a week. Gringos and doctors did not believe in mal aire and the power of spirits, she commented, but it was clear to her that modern medicine (“los doctores”) had its limitations. Lucía’s story and the way she chose to relate it to me is remarkable for several reasons. First, as a Catholic, she had no reservations about blaming “ghosts” (fantasmas, espectros) for her illness. When I asked about the spirits in relation to her faith, she explained that the church recognized the power of the dead over the living. She named All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day as times when “ghosts and spirits” made their way into church life, and then remarked that even Jesus acknowledged the existence of demons. Her religious commitments did not prevent her participation in traditional healing practices, or in talking about them with me. Instead, her reservation in raising the topic had to do with my status as a gringa, as a North American she presumed to be fully incorporated into a modern worldview that places faith in scientific medicine. She was aware that her narrative, in which she gave up on “modern” medicine in favor of a more“traditional”approach,might make her appear backward or superstitious in my eyes. Indeed, she only proceeded to tell her story after I confirmed that I might be sympathetic by saying that I found scientific medicine to be lacking at times. As much for its revelation of a particular religious worldview or as a marker of an awareness of a social hierarchy that divides the scientific from the traditional, however, Lucía’s story is remarkable as a tale that shows the keen awareness Marqueños have for the discourses on modernity and tradition as they relate to healing, development, and religion. In telling me about her illness and subsequent cure, Lucía was reproducing, at least in part, development and religious discourses about healing and the body as they relate to the larger world. Her story included certain overlaps—she could easily place ghosts and spirits into a Catholic pantheon, she was willing to seek modern medical assistance as well as traditional remedies—but it was also a tale of resistance and separation. In declaring that scientific medicine did not 170 Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories cure her, she was making a statement that modernity and its accoutrements , at least as they relate to health and the body, may not always lead to progress, relief, or certain kinds of salvation. We will now turn to the role of bodies and persons in religion and development discourses, looking at the...

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