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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
In a 2005 address given at Harvard Divinity School, Professor Peggy Levitt declared that "God needs no passport" because immigrants bring religious beliefs and practices with them to host countries, often maintaining these beliefs and practices in the face of divergent cultural norms (cited by Brustman 2006). While God may not need a passport in the case of immigration, members of faith-based organizations frequently obtain and use passports as they travel to overseas mission projects with the aim of doing God's work. This article examines the role of faith-based organizations in international development, emphasizing tourism as a vehicle which renders visible the many entanglements such involvement begets and sustains.
I choose to focus on tourism because of a certain parallel between recent moves toward sustainable development that involve programs of eco-tourism and volunteerism, and Christian missions. Like tourists involved in sustainable efforts at conservation or in cultural education, many missionaries arrive in host counties with the strong desire to make a difference, not just in people's spiritual beliefs, but also in the physical world in which people form those beliefs. Education, conservation, and the establishment of basic medical and agricultural services are activities that allow visitors to foreign countries, be they on holiday or religiously inspired missions, to close the gap between themselves and the people they have come to get to know and, in many cases, to serve. Tourism in this way furthers development as an active and vital meeting ground where both religious and secular activities are at play.
The consequences of this shared space of interaction often go unnoticed in literature concerning both sustainable development and tourism in Latin America. Despite the fact that many North American Christian missionaries engage in aid activities, little work has been done to study the effects of missionaries who are often directly involved with development projects. At the same time, most studies of tourism do not consider religiously motivated visitors. If we want to understand the full spectrum of development in Latin America and also wish to address the cultural and environmental challenges that such development may bring, we must take into account religiously motivated activities, including tourism and the relationship between faith-based organizations and the communities with which they interact.
This article makes just such an accounting by taking a wide view. I begin by exploring the histories that have entangled religions and development in Latin America, and then examining the results of those histories in the context of tourism through three case studies in which religiously motivated "tourists" take part in development projects. The first of these case studies, a Catholic women's group in central Ecuador, serves as a window into the way tourism both hinders and helps sustainable development efforts in the context of religiously affiliated organizations. The second case study considers the role of international, religiously based tourism as it combines with social activism in the form of "alternative" spring break trips in which North American college students affiliated with a mainline Protestant church perform service projects overseas, in this instance in Haiti. The final case study focuses on the ways in which the discourse of religion and development works to influence local worldviews as it examines the movement of evangelical Protestant rhetoric across geographic and institutional borders.
All these cases are part of a substantial study of the intersection of religion and development conducted over the course of more than three years, from the summer of 2000 until early 2004. Research included 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador, primarily in a small, cantonal capital in the central highlands, as well as interviews with North American missionary and aid workers in the United States. The cases I have chosen to include here are those from my work that I feel are most relevant to the question of sustainable development, and those which gesture toward larger realities of which the people that comprise them are a small part.
Thus, while they do not represent a complete picture of the multitude of ways that religion and development interact in the spaces tourism creates, these cases highlight the manners in which religion and development can and do find common expression in acts of tourism and in "tourists" themselves. By mixing religious motivations and development activities into hybrid forms, participants in religiously motivated development projects challenge common scholarly assumptions that development is a purely secular endeavor (Escobar 1995; Rist 1997; Sachs 1992). They also raise important questions about sustainability and cultural continuity in the face of religious conversion and shared experiences of the divine. They point to the fact that we can only fully address sustainability in the context of cosmology--the ways in which people conceptualize, and then move to change and protect, the world in which they live.
Postcard October 30, 2002. Central Ecuador The medical staff prepared for the day, laying out bandages and hanging curtains in a large public schoolroom in order to create private spaces for consultations. They chatted as they worked, commenting on the spectacular view of Ecuador's largest volcano that they had enjoyed on the drive from Quito the previous afternoon. Coming from places as diverse and distant as Cuba, Denmark and the United States, for many of them the journey to the small community was their first foray into the rugged countryside of the Ecuadorian highlands. They passed digital cameras hand to hand, sharing photos of their adventures to date while they chatted excitedly about an upcoming trip to the Otavalo indigenous market in the north of the country. As the time for the clinic's opening drew near, they put the cameras down and reached into their pockets for the portable Bibles they all carried, opening to a passage in Galatians as the clinic director began a devotional. Finishing the reading and commentary, the staff said a collective prayer for the patients they would attend that day and then set to work, opening the doors of the school to a waiting crowd of rural Ecuadorians anxious for the basic medical and dental care the evangelical Christian mobile medical team would provide.
Theorizing Religion and Development
The evangelical mobile medical team provides a particularly clear example of the ways that religious and development activities can combine with tourism to create tangled and hybrid situations that push against any simple definition dividing religious motivations from secular. Praying, passing around pictures of local landscapes, and arranging medications for distribution in a rural Ecuadorian community are all part of a larger complex in which religion, tourism and development can intertwine and have done so in the course of their engagement in the world.
Unraveling the many threads of this engagement is tricky business, and involves careful attention to the tangled genealogies that have combined to create situations where religion, development, and tourism combine. By theorizing religion and development in their various historical contexts, we are better able to see the many paths that lead to the presence of evangelical tourists engaged in medical projects in rural Ecuador, and to better understand the relationship among religious ideologies, development practices, and tourism as a vehicle for both.
Perhaps the simplest place to begin such an historicized...
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