While all of this is to be expected, I can't help but reminisce over the conference-style settings of my college classroom experience, where the success of the class and intellectual pursuit is contingent upon everyone bringing something (be it a question, a critique, or in some cases, a hands on experience) to the table. That, and the fact that I spent an entire year (more than that actually), researching and writing a thesis that is currently bound and collecting dust in a brick tower in Portland, Oregon (all allusions toward an ivory tower intended). While there is hope in the future that I will chop it up into pamphlets and essays that are accessible to diverse communities, I am feeling like I would like to revisit it and put it into the web 2.0 context.
As I will be going back down to Ecuador early July, I think it might serve as a way to put some of this material to use and up for discussion. While travel writing is often successful at describing a place, people and is easily accessible, yet much of the time, it tends to lack direction and a focus. Writing a thesis (we hope) has direction, but is often inaccessible. What I'd like to do here is to continue exploring themes that came up in my thesis, while simultaneously making some of that information accessible. I realize that this exercise might just be a shot in the dark as a way of resisting post-college stagnance, but if there's a small chance that people read it and do learn something, then it's worth it to me.
I'm going to get the ball rolling by posting the title and abstract to my thesis:
Title:
Fuera de la Oscuridad: Shifting Subjectivities among Evangelical and Catholic Kichwa through Discourses of Illness and Modernity
Abstract:
In this study, I argue that indigenous Kichwa in Ecuador use both illness and conversion narratives as practices and ways of understanding a new type of subjectivity that emerges from discourses of modernity and medical pluralism. Drawn from fieldwork and library research over the course of two and a half years in the Highland community of La Esperanza, this project explores how social change is largely understood in terms of religious transformation, and how the resulting conversion to Evangelical Christianity has produced a shift in the ways in which people conceptualize and approach healing alternatives as a medically plural system of values. This thesis examines the ways in which structural inequalities and power asymmetries are inscribed onto and experienced within Kichwa bodies through illness, and how these experiences are influenced by and rearticulated through religious language and metaphors of social and self-transformation.
