Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymaras, and the "New Evangelization" (review)

Andrew Orta's book deals (ostensibly, at least) with the implementation of Catholic missionary practices inspired by a "theology of inculturation" among Aymara-speaking peasants in the Bolivian altiplano.¹

These practices constitute the latest phase in a "New Evangelization" embarked upon by the Church in Latin America after World War II (particularly after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65) and imagined as a rectification of the flawed and violent conversion that followed the conquest. During the 1960s and 70s the New Evangelization in the altiplano, as elsewhere in Latin America, was oriented primarily by liberation theology, with its emphasis on class differences and its "preferential option for the poor" requiring the empowerment of lay pastoral agents and grass-roots organizations. By the time Orta began his fieldwork in the late 1980s, re-evangelization efforts had been recast in inculturationist terms, a move which involved a valorization of the Aymara peasantry's "Aymaraness" as opposed to a generic class condition.

Inculturationism posits Christianity as a force that must become "incarnated" in local cultural forms if conversion is to be effective, and views "culture" in general—any given culture—as being already Christian in essence or potentiality. Inculturationism as a missionary strategy can take a variety of forms—particularly liturgical adaptations involving native performances and symbols, and "dynamic" translation practices incorporating native religious categories (things which have, of course, been going on since long before the development of a theology of inculturation). As stated in the book's opening paragraph, the application of inculturation theology results in a surprising twist to previous pastoral policies: "To become more Christian, the missionaries declare, the Aymara must become more 'Indian' and return to 'the ways of the ancestors'—ways that the missionaries have come to see as local cultural expressions of Christian values" (vii).

Orta approaches his topic through the theoretical lense of globalization and the production of locality in globalizing contexts. Firstly, the transition from liberation theology to inculturationism is presented as symptomatic of the global shift from a politics of class to a politics of ethnicity. Orta also argues that even though inculturationism may seem to be an inherently localizing move, it is still part and parcel of global forces and tends to impose standardized and thus fictional models of local culture, in this case a generic "Aymaraness" that does not always sit well with local practices. It is the Aymara catechists deputized by the mostly North American and European inculturationist missionaries who are engaged in the real task of the production of locality, and who are the real protagonists of the book. A second dominant theme is that of cultural and historical essentialisms, binarisms, and presuppositions of purity or continuity. Orta notes the importance of such essentialisms for missionary models and practices—in particular, inculturationst missionaries see Aymara culture, and the Aymara person, as a composite consisting of an unchanged Aymara core with an overlay of colonial or "creole" Christianity. At the same time, Orta is very much engaged in the critique of such essentialisms as they pervade anthropological and ethnohistorical research on the Andes. The critique is closely tied to the question of locality, which, he emphasizes, must be seen "not as an embattled site of primordial authenticity but as an evanescent project continually produced by a range of situated actors" (204).

Catechizing Culture has surprisingly little to say about catechesis or missionization per se. Only chapters 2 and 3, out of a total of seven, are fully dedicated to the subject, and they are primarily background chapters. There is only the briefest and most general discussion of inculturationism—little or nothing is said of its development, of its application worldwide, and of the debates that it has sparked within the Church. (Without being an expert on the topic, I suspect that the break or discontinuity between liberation theology and inculturationism is not as radical as Orta claims—inculturationism...