Coming out of the "Iron Cage": The Indigenists of the Society of the Divine Word in Paraguay, 1910-2000.

Rivera-Pagan, Luis N.

Coming out of the "Iron Cage": The Indigenists of the Society of the Divine Word in Paraguay, 1910-2000.

By Darius J. Piwowarczyk. Fribourg, Switz.: Academic Press, 2008. Pp. 368. Paperback SFr 75/50 [euro].

Coming out of the "Iron Cage" is an excellent contribution to missions history and to a critical theological and anthropological reflection of Western missionary endeavors among indigenous communities. The book is structured according to the author's scheme of three discrete historical phases of the missionary engagement of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) among Amerindians in Paraguay during the twentieth century.

The first phase, from 1910 to 1925, takes place in an environment distinguished by the secular ideology of progress, under the shadows of Western imperial expansion, and with the ecclesiastical twin goals of Christianizing and civilizing the Amerindians. It had the support of the Paraguayan state, which wanted to civilize its "savages." The SVD thus entered into the contested minefield of Indigenism-the attempt to construct the identity of the Amerindians, their Indianness. Skillfully using Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical concepts and an exhaustive research in the SVD archives, Piwowarczyk is able to elucidate the historical aporias and paradoxes of that missionary endeavor, what the author calls its historical ironies, which were the crossroads and conflicts between the global process of modernization, the political purposes of the Paraguayan national state, the imperial aspirations of Germany, and the conservative ambiance prevailing in the Roman Catholic Church.

The second phase begins in the mid-1960s, in a world characterized by the global hegemony of the United States, a Catholic Church transformed by the Second Vatican Council, and the mantra of "development" as the recipe for addressing the plights of the so-called underdeveloped nations. Piwowarczyk aptly lays out the different actors and agents in the disputed field of Indigenism. A new theological trend also makes its entrance: Latin American liberation theology, which inspires new ecclesiastical and political disturbances. The author illuminates the conflicts between the missionary utopia and its historical implementations.

The third phase begins in the early 1970s with the severe critique of missions by the First Barbados Conference. Now the main themes are the protection of the indigenous cultures, the self-determination of the native communities, and the defense of their land claims. This new phase takes place in the global environment of "flexible accumulation," the hegemony of globalizing neoliberalism, and the postmodernist stress on difference and identity politics. The key idea is "cooperation-participation." SVD's missionary work is reshaped, and new contestants emerge in the dispute about the proper dialectics between nation and ethnicity, conversion and social justice. Again, Piwowarczyk's critical gaze dissects the ambivalences and contradictions of SVD's missionary project.

This book should be required reading, especially in times like ours, when indigenous communities have, for the first time in history, become important protagonists in Latin American national politics.

Luis N. Rivera-Pagan is Professor Emeritus of Ecumenics and Mission at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.