In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Truman’s Earthworms Two weeks before I was scheduled to leave Ecuador after my fieldwork in 2002–3, I found myself across the fence from Vicente’s backyard, once again up to my elbows in earthworms. This time I was digging up the great-great-grandchildren of Viche’s original bunch to take back to San Marcos,where Ruth had requested them for a gardening project she had started with a local evangelical community. Though my efforts in the compost pile outside of the health care clinic drew some attention from passersby and clinic patients,no one asked if these were Protestant earthworms, or if I was going to use them for religious purposes. The irony, of course, is that this particular collection was destined to become directly involved in an evangelical aid project. Though I had assured Vicente seven years before that these earthworms were secular creatures, unaffiliated with any of the Protestant projects he had heard about, my actions were about to launch the worms on the road to conversion . I was giving them over to a development project that consciously combines development aid with attempts to lead people to a Protestant understanding of salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Truman’s earthworms—cycled through Kennedy’s vision of secular service and more than half a decade of care by an Ecuadorian Catholic peasant farmer—were about to come full circle, realizing their roots in a Christian ethic that combines technological change with the idea that, as Truman put it,“all men are created in the 197 image of God”and are therefore eligible for the“benefits of [Western] scientific advances and industrial progress available for . . . improvement and growth.” Throughout this book, I have attempted to explain how earthworms could be the objects of both religious and secular concern, and subsequently vehicles through which people negotiate the role of religion and development in their lives and worldviews. Beginning with an analysis of development discourse, we have seen that whereas most scholars locate development in a modernity characterized by a separation of “progress”from tradition, and especially from religion, development never moved entirely away from its home in religious discourses on salvation or in religious practices.When Columbus and other Spanish conquistadores came to the New World, they did so with the motivation of a double conversion. Seeking to turn New World wealth into material gain,they also looked to bring New World souls to Christianity for what they perceived to be a greater spiritual good.And they were not the first to do so. Before the Spanish conquest of the New World, intraAndean conquest also linked technical and religious change to the state. The antecedents to modern development in the Andes were thus forged along Inca roads, and in Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican missions that combined religious education with Western agricultural and industrial techniques in an effort to bring spiritual and physical advancement to New World peoples as they brought material and spiritual gain to Europeans and the institutions of crown and church. While development has been a state concern since before colonial times, then, I have also shown that it has never entirely made the leap into the secular realm, and remains entangled in religious discourses and practices as it deploys through the networks of everyday contemporary life. In San Marcos kitchens, bedrooms, gardens, buildings, and bodies, religious and development discourses come together, creating a situation in which Ecuadorians negotiate the terms of this confluence, sometimes combining them and sometimes breaking them apart, often in ways unintended by the people with whom such discourses originate and through whom they deploy. Recognizing the hybridity created by religious and development discourses where they come together, Marqueños use that hybridity and resist it in the process of negotiating the terms of progress, and thus the terms of modernity itself. 198 Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories In bedrooms people combine religious doctrine with development rhetoric on cleanliness and family planning to create worldviews that either support or reject artificial birth control. In kitchens women keep open fires and propane stoves in order to cook both traditional and modern foodstuffs. For many, cleanliness is equated with godliness, as Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelical missionaries combine lessons on sanitation with a religious message of salvation. And guinea pigs, the subject of religious and development discourses, live both inside the kitchen and outside in cages, their location in the household a determining factor in the...

Share