Abstract:

This dissertation tracks the use of charity as a modern political instrument in Guayaquil, Ecuador. My ethnographic and historical research foregrounds emerging cultures of sacrifice in Catholic humanitarian efforts from the mid-19th century forward, highlighting the secularization of philanthropic work in increasingly pluri-confessional contexts. Across post-Independence Ecuador, Catholic peoples' charitable giving and receiving have been central to popular conceptions of self and sacrifice. Yet charitable sympathies shift between the 19th and 20th centuries from a paradigm of shelter and reform, to one of medical care and technical training. This research shows how different forms of charitable practice--meant to ameliorate gross inequalities--often normalize a self-sacrificial saintly ethics' that challenges democratic processes and may even circumvent the rule of law. Such charitable performances take place across myriad socio-historical moments and political contexts. In Guayaquil's state penitentiary, inmates recently responded to the unconstitutionality of their preventive imprisonment with 'crucifixion protests' to demonstrate how abject state subjects fall outside of civil and human rights. I examine why this kind of protest (a symbolic appropriation of national political theology) draws near-constant media coverage and a coalition of unlikely public sympathy for the prisoners' cause. In the midst of Guayaquil's current urban renewal, the Catholic organization Opus Dei created employment training programs that discouraged communitarian political aims and replaced them with a sacrificial ethic of individual economic rights. In 20th century Church-based clinics, federal health agencies increasingly regulated medical attention, creating hidden cultural fault lines between the voluntary ethics of medical charity and mandatory clinical standards. I chart the religious impact of this medical modernization in Catholic hagiographies and testimonies about popular 'doctor-saints,' i.e. individuals who provide free but unorthodox clinical services, and whose stories of persecution and martyrdom are told and retold by their followers. This dissertation follows the Catholic logic of these charitable exchanges back into 19th century racial and gendered Republican developments. My archive and field research provides a genealogy of Ecuadorian Catholic humanitarianism, analyzing the modern political economy of religious sacrifice in medical and labor-oriented charities that become problematic moral substitutes for civil and human rights.