Although it might not be immediately obvious on the surface, Christian missionaries and development workers follow a similar logic. Both function as external forces that bring modernisation to traditional communities, and both exhibit a hegemonic faith in introducing new and better ways of engaging in daily activities. These beliefs in progress and rationality justify mobilising against tradition and acting on a desire to save people by lifting them out of their current conditions. Furthermore, both missionaries and development workers often express holistic concerns for both material and spiritual conversion.
The hybrid nature of Christianity and development work is the main theme that drives Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories. Jill DeTemple, now an associate professor of religious studies, worked as an agricultural extensionist with the US Peace Corps in the province of Bolívar in highland Ecuador in 1994–6 before returning for PhD fieldwork in 2002–3. In this book, a revision of her dissertation, DeTemple examines this relationship between development and Christianity (although she frames the discussion as being about religion, her treatment is limited exclusively to Christianity, and primarily to its evangelical Protestant variation). She argues that development has its roots in religious ideals, and that both respond to similar logics and motivations as they become entangled with each other. Both negotiate hybrid ideologies, discourses, actions and analytical tools.
As part of DeTemple's fieldwork she observed the training of Peace Corps volunteers, and those lessons are at the heart of her ideas on how best to engage in development work. Although she gives a nod to critiques that the Peace Corps functions as a tool of empire that fosters dependency on an imperial power, for the most part she depicts the organisation as a better alternative than many other development organisations. DeTemple depicts both evangelical Christians and the Peace Corps as committed to integrated development. In both cases, success is measured in terms not of quantifiable economic progress but of personal and individual transformations. She emphasises that both Christian missionaries and development workers are most successful when their primary objective is to do no harm.
DeTemple returns to the theme of integrated development in her final chapter, ‘Spiritual Cardiology’, when she discusses the efforts of an evangelical group, HCJB, to construct medical missions in Ecuador. As with the most successful development programmes, HCJB ministers to the ‘whole person’. This involves chaplain visits to patients and required Bible studies for medical interns regardless of their religious beliefs. These efforts require the integration of social and cultural aspects of life.
A key theme that runs throughout this book is the hybridised nature of the intertwining of Christian discourses and development work. The book opens with an ethnographic story of a Catholic farmer quizzing DeTemple about whether her work on a composting project as a Peace Corps volunteer was part of an attempt to convert him to evangelical Christianity. While that was not her intent, by the end of the book she acknowledges just how intertwined religious and secular concerns have become. Both draw on similar discourses and actions, and that hybridity defines how their practitioners act and how local community members respond to their efforts.
This book is largely written outside a specific context of political developments in Ecuador, and includes only minor and passing critiques of both development projects and religious conversion efforts. This is unfortunate, as both indigenous organisations, including the main federation, CONAIE, and scholars such as Víctor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar have advanced serious critiques of development programmes such as PRODEPINE for failing to address the fundamental underlying structural problems that neoliberal economic policies have introduced into the country.
The book also largely dodges concerns about the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in community development. These include the tendency of NGOs to be more concerned about maintaining their institutional sustainability than addressing underlying structural problems, as well as the tendency of development projects to undermine the more explicitly political projects of social movements. The Bolivian vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, has recently written a book titled El ‘oenegismo’, enfermedad infantil del derechismo (2011, available at www.vicepresidencia.gob.bo) that examines how this process of ‘NGOification’ of community projects fundamentally advances a conservative neoliberal agenda. For this reason, and in a highly controversial move, the Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, has attempted to restrict the work of NGOs in Ecuador. These types of political issues extend well beyond the intended scope of the book.
A result of the book's focus is that Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories is more useful for development practitioners, both of a secular and religious nature, than those concerned with the politics of development work. For those practitioners, it provides useful reflections on how the negotiation of religious and development discourses becomes constructed in specific and concrete spaces such as kitchens and bedrooms. DeTemple contends that how these discourses are negotiated will have lasting consequences for both development and religious work in Latin America.
