Deviant Religion and Cultural Evolution: The
Aymara Case
Abstract: The role that "deviant" religions can play in the processes of
cultural evolution has been largely overlooked by anthropologists. Among the
Aymara Indians of Peru, a once ostracized and persecuted group of seventh
Day Adventists has assumed leadership as the community system is transformed
from a subsistence agriculture economy to a money economy. To explain this
emergence of a Protestant elite in a predominantly Catholic society, a
"Weberian" hypothesis, based on a causal relation between Protestantism and
capitalism, is tested and rejected. An alternative hypothesis, based on the
adaptive value of deviance in the evolutionary process proves more in accord
with the data. It is shown that deviant religion, while not a primary cause
of cultural evolution, may be a powerful directive force.
A basic principle of biological evolution is that genetic variation is an
essential precondition to adaptive change; a group of organisms "must have the
materials for such changes, not only in the sense of established structural
norms but also and more particularly in the sense of variations from those
norms, of the potentiality for changes in them in order to adapt them to meet
new opportunities or necessities" (Simpson, 1949: 146). The extension of this
principle of variation from biological change to cultural change may be no
more than strained analogy, or it may be, as a general systems theorist might
maintain, actual homology, (e.g., Ashby, 1968; Buckley, 1968: 495). In any
case, such a principle is explicitly recognized in some theories of
sociocultural evolution (e.g., Boehm, 1978); social systems require variation,
or deviance, to adapt to environmental changes. Although Max Weber's classic
correlation between Protestantism and industrialization is certainly
suggestive, the role of religious deviation in the processes of
cultural evolution has been virtually ignored by anthropologists.
One need not seek far for the reasons for such indifference. As long as
synchronic functionalist and structuralist paradigms dominated anthropology,
deviance of any kind was viewed as dysfunctional to a social system's
equilibrium. Conflict theorists, such as Max Gluckman (1956), emphasized
deviation but only to the purpose of demonstrating how it was ultimately
stabilizing. Even cultural evolutionists sometimes seemed oblivious to the
adaptive value of deviance; neither Leslie White (1959) nor Julian Steward
(1955) treat directly this principle in their major works on cultural
evolution. Nor would we expect much attention to religious deviance in any
case, since theories of cultural evolution have tended to be strongly
materialist, focusing on transformations of energy and on technoenvironmental
determinants. Ideology has been secondary, often tertiary (after social
structure) in such theories.
Particular ethnographic studies have ignored the role of religious
deviation in cultural evolution for several reasons. First, most of the
changes observed directly by anthropologists have come about through culture
contact, and therefore are subsumed under the diffusionist or acculturation
models rather than the evolutionary model. But as Steward (1970: 2, 4) points
out, such distinctions are "inadequate" since modernization, by whatever
processes, "is evolutionary in that basic patterns and structures are
qualitatively altered." Second, when anthropologists have analyzed the
relation between religion and culture change, they have either focused on the
reactionary character of the normative religion or they have studied deviant
religions which turned out to be maladaptive, such as the Ghost Dance or
various cargo cults. Finally, as long as missionaries were considered the
unmitigated villians of anthropology, there could be little sympathy for any
possible value to their social disruptions. Keesing (1976: 461) succinctly
summarizes a widely held viewpoint:
One of the many impediments to the success of fundamentalist Protestant
missionaries has been the austerity and emptiness of the new life preferred in
place of the old. A pall of Protestant gloom hangs over many a community in
the Pacific and tropical South America that once throbbed with life, laughter
and song.... Protestantism, as Weber (1956) and Tawney (1926) have
compellingly argued, has historically been closely associated with the rise of
capitalism, supported indirectly by the corporate wealth of Europe and the
United States .... [Christianity] has been a direct instrument of imperialism
to spread religion while gaining raw materials, markets and cheap labor.
On the positive side, general systems theory recognizes "the absolute
necessity of deviationor more generally 'variety'--in providing a pool of
potential transformations of process or structure that the adaptive system
might adopt in responding to goal-mismatch" (Buckley, 1968: 495). Erich Fromm
and Michael Maccoby (1970)--whose study will deserve further discussion
later--have documented the role of the deviant individual in the process of
culture change.
The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Basin in Peru provide a perfect
setting for examining the manner in which religious deviation can provide that
pool of variability essential to adaptation in a rapidly changing environment.
A fifteen month study, employing participation-observation techniques plus an
extensive questionnaire given by native leaders in three communities, clearly
revealed that these people are presently undergoing a rapid and fundamental
evolution from a subsistence agriculture economy to a money economy (1) which
has affected virtually every aspect of their social system (Lewellen, 1978).
In Soqa, the primary community of the study, a small Protestant elite has
recently come into existence and assumed leadership in the process of change.
In this paper, I have developed and tested hypotheses to explain this
phenomenon, with the goal of understanding some of the processes by which a
deviant religion can contribute to cultural evolution.
A PROTESTANT ELITE AMONG CATHOLIC AYMARA
Soqa, a community of 267 families, is situated on an island near the
western shore of Lake Titicaca, connected to the mainland by a hundred-yard
causeway that is knee-deep under water for about half of each year. Though
exceptionally isolated, more than sixteen kilometers from the nearest town or
highway, Soqa is typical of hundreds of peasant communities exploiting the
relatively rich farm land around Lake Titicaca--at 3,800 meters (2,500 feet)
the highest navigable lake in the world. Isolated both by physical barriers
and by a rigid class structure, the Aymara have for centuries maintained a
relatively closed social and economic system based on subsistence agriculture
and animal husbandry. Largely self-sufficient, the people of Soqa have had
minimal relations even with the larger regional campesino markets. However,
within the last twenty or thirty years, the population, which has been growing
slowly but exponentially for a century, exceeded available land to such an
extent that few families could any longer be supported by agriculture alone,
and many were forced to take wage labor jobs on the coast for several months
each year. Exactly coincident with this sudden and severe economic change was
the emergence of a small minority of Seventh Day Adventists as a power elite
in the community.
There is little in the anthropological literature that would have predicted
such a phenomenon. Protestants in Catholic societies have been portrayed as
deviant individuals who were attracted to the new religion by capitalist
greed, or by a personal inability to fit into the normative culture and who
are frustrated and disillusioned from having to repudiate their own traditions
and social networks (e.g., Carter, 1965). Recalling the quotation from
Keesing, above, on the effects of Protestant missionization, we might well
expect to find the Adventists on Soqa to be a disillusioned group of anomic
marginals joylessly repudiating their heritage while lusting shamefully after
Western goods.
The real picture is somewhat different. Adventists, and one Jehovah's
Witness (born Adventist), comprise 18% of Soqa's population. This
minority
. . . holds the bulk of political power. Four of the top six political
offices, including that of president, are held by Adventists, and they also
hold 37% of all political positions;
... has more and considerably better schooling than Catholics (4.47 years
for Adventist men, 3.05 for Catholic men);
... has an 18% larger per family money income (Adventist $633, Catholic
$519; 1975 U.S. dollars translated from Peruvian soles);
... includes significantly (2) more men in the lucrative profession of
musician (Adventist 15% of household heads, Catholic 4%);
. . . includes a greater proportion of its temporary migrants to the
coast who work in the longer-term, more profitable jobs in construction,
mining and factory work (Adventist 40% of the migratory work force, Catholic
23%; the rest work as farm laborers);
... takes out seventeen times as many loans from the Banco Agropecuario
to buy cattle to fatten and resell for a profit (Adventist 17% of
households, Catholic 1%);
... has more corregated metal roofs--as opposed to thatch--per family
housing complex (Adventist 1.54 roofs per family, Catholic 1.26);
. . . has more possessions (on a list of eleven items, Adventists scored
significantly higher on six and slightly higher on three).
When an extensive attitudinal questionnaire was given,
Adventists
... showed significantly higher pro-education scores on all four questions
designed to measure this factor;
... showed one slightly higher score and two significantly higher scores on
questions designed to measure orientation to capitalism;
... chose education over profit on three questions which put these factors
in conflict;
. . . and, surprisingly, showed themselves as more traditional on some
questions designed to measure this factor.
In sum, we find on Soqa not a group of greedy marginals suffering the
pangs of anomie, but a relatively educated, slightly traditional elite
which holds political and economic power out of proportion to its meager
numbers. Why?
A "WEBERIAN" HYPOTHESIS
The relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has become such a
commonplace since Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1956; orig. 1904) that it is simple reflex to
hypothesize that this relation is the key to understanding the situation on
Soqa. However, if we define "capitalism" in terms of free market or
entrepreneurial enterprise, it is difficult to find any real difference
between Catholic and Protestant among the Aymara. In Soqa, there is so little
agricultural surplus that market sales are minimal for both groups. Adventists
do purchase more cattle to fatten on lakeweed and sell for a profit, but
virtually every family is involved in this enterprise and the difference
between Catholic and Adventist is not significant. Yet if we narrowly define
"capitalism" as the tendency to invest surplus back into the means
of production, we may indeed find a difference. Catholic capital would
seem to be drained away through the fiesta system, while Protestants are free
to utilize their wealth productively.
We can thus state the hypothesis: People with a more capitalistic
orientation, who want to escape the costs of the fiesta system in order to
invest their money more productively, are attracted to Adventism, thus forming
an economic elite.
To validate the hypothesis, it would be necessary to show (1) that the
fiesta system actually does drain significant amounts of capital from the
community; (2) that the Adventists invest significantly more in money-making
activities; and (3) that the financial motive is a strong one for people
converting to Adventism.
All of these were tested; none of them is true.
First, the fiesta system simply does not cost that much. There is no
cargo system, no hierarchy of offices, and sponsors are appointed on a
rigid, no-refusal rotation basis; no one is ever chosen as sponsor for a major
fiesta more than once every five to eight years. Since one serves but a single
day of a major fiesta, costs for 1975 to mid-1976 averaged only $157 for the
largest fiesta, $40 for the second largest, and a mere $23 for the third
largest. As the family income for Soqa Catholics is $519 per year, of which
about $280 enters the community (the rest is spent on the coast), it is
obvious that the fiesta system, as practiced in Soqa, is not tying up a great
deal of capital. Second, virtually the only money investment in production is
in purchasing cattle to fatten and resell, and, as we have seen, the
difference--1.28 to 1.22 bulls per year--is not significant. Finally, of the
five Adventist converts interviewed about their motives for converting, the
only one with even a remotely economic motive was a poor Catholic who "married
up" to a wealthier Adventist girl and accepted her religion as part of the
marriage deal.
A closer examination of the statistics on Adventists and Catholics in Soqa
reveals that differences in wealth and investment are real, but relatively
small. The truly large difference--one measured both in average attained grade
level and in attitudes--is in the area of education. It is here that we must
seek our alternative hypothesis.
EDUCATION AND ADAPTIVE SELECTION
An alternative hypothesis, based on an evolutionary model, might be: In
offering educational opportunities not otherwise available, Adventism has
attracted a group of people more intelligent, progressive and
independent than the norm. Though the values and skills promoted by the
new religion are dysfunctional or irrelevant to a socioeconomic system
based on subsistence agriculture, they have become essential as Soga
enters the money economy.
Fortunately, we have a fairly complete history of the founding of the
Adventist church in the Titicaca area in the writings of F. A. Stahl (1920)
and J. B. A. Kessler, Jr. (1967). The particular history of Adventism on Soqa
was gathered through interviews.
At the turn of the century, a young man named Manuel Ziniga Comacho was
sent by his parents from his home in Plateria to work the nitrate mines in
Chile. While there, Zuniga received some education in a Protestant school and,
while remaining unconverted, became convinced that education was the answer to
his people's oppression and poverty. Returning to Plateria, he attempted to
found the first school for the Aymara but immediately came into conflict with
the Catholic Church and with mestizos who held a strong vested interest
in maintaining the status quo. The school was closed, under pressure, in 1907
after only three years of operation.
Believing that the presence of foreigners might restrain persecution,
Zuniga journeyed to Ariquipa to ask the Adventist mission there for support.
Though his trip was motivated by desire for education, not religion, he
converted to Adventism as a condition of their support. In 1908 it was
arranged that Frederick and Anna Stahl, missionaries recently appointed to
Bolivia, would devote half their time to helping Zuniga. As the school showed
signs of success, the Stahls came to devote full time to it, adding the first
campesino health clinic in the area. Thus Adventism was essentially sold as a
package deal--education, health, and religion, roughly in that order--and this
resulted in the greatest Adventist success in South America.
In 1911, Frederick Stahl visited Soqa. invited by Pedro Cutipa, grandfather
of the present president of the community and at that time cacique or headman
of his group. After a time studying at the Plateria school, Pedro Cutipa
returned to Soqa to start his own classes and eventually to found Adventism on
the island. By 1916, there were five families on Soqa professing the new
denomination.
Classes were taught in Spanish, for good reason: the avowed purpose of
education was to permit individuals to read their Castillan Spanish Bibles.
Soon Adventists were the only literate campesinos and about the only ones who
spoke Spanish. However, such skills were useless to the tight, closed world of
the Aymara and extremely threatening to those who lived by systematic
oppression of the Indians. Persecution was ferocious.
In 1913, the Bishop of Puno marched with two hundred men on the Plateria
mission, ransacking the buildings, beating and hauling off to jail the
occupants, including Zuniga (the Stahls were away). In other incidents,
Adventists were beaten at random, and death threats were common. Since
Adventists were not permitted by their religion to drink alcohol, a favorite
fiesta sport was to capture Adventists and pour liquor down their throats.
Among the Quechua Indians to the north of the lake, persecution was even more
violent, since campesino education threatened the hacienda system (the Aymara
are mostly freeholders). A number of Adventist were killed and schools were
burned to the ground.
Nevertheless, for more than forty years, until the early fifties, Adventism
had a virtual monopoly on education in the area. By 1950, there were 166
Adventist schools in the southern Peruvian highlands. Yet there remained
little practical value for education; peasant life was a dreary round of
plantings and harvests. In such a culture, based on tradition and organized by
kinship bonds, Adventism was not only deviant but also disruptive and
dysfunctional.
However, massive change was already unavoidable. It is characteristic of a
positive feedback system that it can remain stable for a long time then
collapse all at once. Exponential population growth--in which the population
doubles in increasingly shorter periods of time--is just such a system. Among
the Titicaca Aymara, after perhaps a millenium of relative stability, the
population severely overgrew its land base in a single generation.
On Soqa, one of the first direct responses to this situation was a complete
change in the system of government. Traditional ayllus were loosely
structured kin groups that formed the political and social basis for the
Aymara system. These were so tenuously structured--Soqa had three
ayllus which bled off onto the mainland in all directions--that they
could only be held together by innumerable fiestas. With a diminution in land
per family, these fiestas could no longer be supported. In 1952, Soqa assumed
a community-style government based on a national model. This, for the first
time, provided direct links to district, department, and national government
agencies. It also secularized government, allowing Protestants to come to
power.
And come to power they did. The closed system based on subsistence
agriculture had broken wide-open almost overnight. Unable to support
themselves on their land, men were forced to seek outside wage labor; today
74% of Soqa men work at least several months of every year on the coast,
mainly in rice fields, but also in construction, mines, and factories. With
entrance into the money economy came vastly increased contacts with mestizos,
markets, and government agencies. Today, Soqa has a large public school and is
building a clinic which, when completed, will be periodically staffed by
government nurses.
On Soqa, only the Adventists were prepared for this rapid transition. They
had a two- or even three-generation head start in the necessary skills of
reading, writing, and speaking Spanish. Equally important, in fighting for
their rights as far as Lima, Adventists had attained some sophistication in
dealing with mestizos and with legal problems. Status used to be based
on wealth; today it is based on the ability and willingness to mediate between
the traditional Aymara community and the outside world. Adventists are the
mediators.
DISCUSSION
The Aymara case is hardly unique; throughout history, small and deviant
religious sects have, after a period of intense persecution, prospered and
ultimately established new social norms. The problem is to view such
development in an evolutionary perspective, to relate it to economic and
social forces that might, originally, be quite independent of religion.
Adventists were not the cause of change on Soqa. Rather they were
the preadaptive group selected by natural evolutionary processes to guide
the community through a rapid transition. While this transition is taking
place at different rates throughout the Titicaca Basin, my data for two other
communities suggests that those communities lacking an educated minority may
be more dilatory in making the necessary adaptations and much more chaotic in
the process.3 Few communities had such an early, rapid, and smooth transition
from ayllu to community government as Soqa, and few have developed such
extensive ties with the outside world. (It may not be purely coincidental that
the area's one native Aymara Catholic priest, the assistant to the Bishop of
Juli, was an Adventist born on Soqa.) No other community I know of has such
ambitions: under the strong leadership of an Adventist presidente
(mayor), Soqa is striving to attain the legal status of
villa, which requires long-term planning and the construction of a
plaza with shops, a high school, a clinic, and a town hall. Only the latter
has been completed so far, at enormous expense in both money and community
labor. Such ambitions, deriving directly from the Adventist leadership, go far
beyond the minimal changes necessary for community survival.
Fromm and Maccoby (1970) view deviant personality as the "central
principle" in the process of change:
In a relatively stable society (or class) with its typical social
character, there will always be deviant characters or even misfits under the
traditional conditions. However, in the process of socioeconomic change, new
economic trends develop for which the traditional character is not well
adapted, while a certain heretofore deviant character type can make optimal
use of the new conditions. (p. 232)
The Aymara data do not refute, but neither do they support, such an
emphasis on individual deviance. Pedro Cutipa was hardly a "deviant
character," certainly not a "misfit" (indeed, he was leader of his ayllu)
before he converted to Adventism. His "deviance" was perhaps only a special
intelligence and readiness to try something new. Cutipa and his followers (and
ultimately their progeny) were deviant not in terms of personality
characteristics but in terms of the religion to which they belonged. The
readiness with which these people moved from their position of ostracism into
the mainstream of community life suggests that, individually, they had always
been more or less in the mainstream. It was institutional ideology and values
that set them apart, not personality.
This analysis poses no threat to materialist theories of cultural
evolution, since the primary cause of change was population growth on a fixed
land base. Once change became necessary, it was naturally funnelled into the
industrial culture that forms the outer environment of the Aymara peasant
system. However, the data do suggest that strict materialist theories may be
too limited, that ideological and structural variations may play a very
important role in determining whether the necessary adaptation will indeed
take place, the manner in which it will take place, and the ease or difficulty
with which it will take place.
Finally, we must consider the primacy of religion as a motive, an idea
which will be anathema to many anthropologists who view all human motives and
strategies in terms of perceived material rewards. What were the rewards
perceived by Pedro Cutipa, who traded a headmanship for ostracism and
persecution at a time when his new religion had little or no adaptive
value--in fact was violently maladaptive? What we have been lacking in
anthropology is recognition of the tremendous power of an idea--of education,
of a new view of God or man. In emphasizing material causes and economic
motives, theorists of cultural evolution may be ignoring one of the most
powerful forces in the transformation of society.
NOTES
1. I do not mean to imply that previously the Aymara were not acquainted
with the use of money; rather, such use was minimal or incidental, whereas
today money plays a significant role in survival alongside agriculture. An
economic formalist would probably use the term "market economy" where I use
"money economy." However, I find this former term extremely confusing in
relation to peasants, as one immediately thinks of sales in regional markets,
rather than national markets, including the labor market. Regional markets
played only a minor role in the economic transition of Soqa, since the
community has little agricultural surplus to sell in such markets.
2. "Significance" in all cases was determined by the chi square test at .05
level.
3. I do not mean to imply that Adventism is the only factor in the rate and
smoothness of the transition. Other factors include availability of arable
land and of lake weed (to feed cattle)--both of which have a significant
effect on the rapidity with which the transition must be made--and distance
from market centers, i.e., closer communities have more options in entering
the money economy, such as tourist crafts, and are often more progressive than
more remote communities.
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