Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories by Jill DeTemple

Author:Jill DeTemple [DeTemple, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS024000 History / Latin America / General
ISBN: 9780268077778
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2014-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

(Re)Production Zones: Bedrooms in Religion, Development, and Household Life

Kitchens of course are not the only place in households where religious and development discourses and personnel come to touch. As the particular focus of both development work and religious attention, sleeping areas are also specialized zones of production where people create hybridized understandings of their lives and worlds, understandings that illuminate the complex relationships people create between religion and development.

Most of the focus of both development and religious discourses in bedrooms is aimed at bodies and health, both spiritual and physical. Development lectures on family health, for example, reflect the fact that entire family units often share a single bed, and frequently include a diagram for placing people with heads next to feet so that they are less likely to share colds or parasites. Sanitation and cleanliness also play major roles in charlas about proper behaviors in bedrooms. Health care workers from Plan International, the Ministry of Public Health, HCJB, the Peace Corps, and other organizations often emphasize the importance of washing bed linens and airing mattresses in their presentations.

By far the greatest emphasis on bedrooms in both development and religious discourses, however, comes in talk about families, familiar relationships, sexuality, and reproduction. While the specifics of proper behavior vary and are openly contested between Catholics and Protestants—and between religiously affiliated and secular development agencies—there is a widespread agreement that what goes on in bedrooms affects the rest of the household. Like kitchens, bedrooms are zones of production where Ecuadorians create, contest, and maintain households and gender roles.

The emphasis on bedrooms, and specifically on sexuality and reproduction, is deep-seated in both development and Christian doctrines. In development, “population” and “overpopulation” as terms used to describe global crises based on human reproduction came into use after Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech.20 In 1952 John D. Rockefeller III established the Population Council to study the “problem” of growing global populations and human reproduction, especially in countries deemed “underdeveloped” in Truman’s inaugural address. Despite this, initial U.S. development policy was ardently removed from the area of human reproduction. In an article on population as a part of development policy, Barbara Duden quotes Dwight D. Eisenhower from a 1959 address, when he stated, “Birth control is not our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity, or function or responsibility.”21

With the popularization of “family planning” as a preferred term in the 1960s (at roughly the same time “family values” began to gain currency as a descriptor of conservative moral stances), the prevailing attitude among development agencies shifted. Duden quotes George H.W. Bush in 1973, when, acting in his capacity of U.S. representative to the United Nations, he declared that the “population problem” was “no longer a private matter . . . [It] commands the attention of national and international leaders.”22 As Duden documents, “birth control” became “family planning” in the course of becoming an international development concern, something that has not changed as state and private

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